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This was an absolute treat, and I'd love to see more talks like it. Huge amount of personality and a long-standing relationship with every topic and person bro

by hhh 8y ago

This was an absolute treat, and I'd love to see more talks like it. Huge amount of personality and a long-standing relationship with every topic and person brought up. I'm happy I got to see it. I hope to personally be able to talk about modern equivalents of such amazing topics in the future. Great voice, great topic, great personality (at least what you can ascertain from a presentation. Worth a listen/viewing.

danso 8y ago
Made me think of Brian Kernighan, another Unix guy who’s still kicking and quite engaging. Googling their names together brought up the fact that the two authored a 1999 book named “The Practice of Programming”, and then -$30 from my wallet for the impulse buy.
- vram22 8y ago
  They also authored "The Unix Programming Environment".
  - tcard 8y ago
    Both are worth every penny. They showcase delightfully a way of understanding and writing software, a kind of down-to-Earth simplicity aesthetics that is usually ditched in favor of sophistication. I believe we're mostly past the point of favoring such philosophy (the Go programming language being maybe the most recent attempt, only partially successful at it), as it has fallen short of what the world demands from software, but it remains a very valuable influence.
    - vram22 8y ago
      >Both are worth every penny. Totally agreed. I cut my programming teeth on UPE and the K&R C book (2nd, ANSI edition), among others. I try to model the command-line tools I write on the style shown in those two books (Kernighan is a co-author of both); being doing that for a long time. Here's an example, a tutorial I wrote for IBM developerWorks - I mentioned it in an HN thread a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17327807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17327807 >They showcase delightfully a way of understanding and writing software, a kind of down-to-Earth simplicity aesthetics that is usually ditched in favor of sophistication. True. >I believe we're mostly past the point of favoring such philosophy (the Go programming language being maybe the most recent attempt, only partially successful at it), as it has fallen short of what the world demands from software, but it remains a very valuable influence. Right, and The Go Programming Language book has Kernighan as a co-author too.
nialv7 8y ago
> great personality Not to disagree, but what you can't see from this lecture is that Rob Pike is... very opinionated. For example: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/ http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/ and http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/ http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/

by hhh 8y ago

danso 8y ago

Made me think of Brian Kernighan, another Unix guy who’s still kicking and quite engaging. Googling their names together brought up the fact that the two authored a 1999 book named “The Practice of Programming”, and then -$30 from my wallet for the impulse buy.

vram22 8y ago
They also authored "The Unix Programming Environment".
- tcard 8y ago
  Both are worth every penny. They showcase delightfully a way of understanding and writing software, a kind of down-to-Earth simplicity aesthetics that is usually ditched in favor of sophistication. I believe we're mostly past the point of favoring such philosophy (the Go programming language being maybe the most recent attempt, only partially successful at it), as it has fallen short of what the world demands from software, but it remains a very valuable influence.
  - vram22 8y ago
    >Both are worth every penny. Totally agreed. I cut my programming teeth on UPE and the K&R C book (2nd, ANSI edition), among others. I try to model the command-line tools I write on the style shown in those two books (Kernighan is a co-author of both); being doing that for a long time. Here's an example, a tutorial I wrote for IBM developerWorks - I mentioned it in an HN thread a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17327807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17327807 >They showcase delightfully a way of understanding and writing software, a kind of down-to-Earth simplicity aesthetics that is usually ditched in favor of sophistication. True. >I believe we're mostly past the point of favoring such philosophy (the Go programming language being maybe the most recent attempt, only partially successful at it), as it has fallen short of what the world demands from software, but it remains a very valuable influence. Right, and The Go Programming Language book has Kernighan as a co-author too.

nialv7 8y ago

> great personality Not to disagree, but what you can't see from this lecture is that Rob Pike is... very opinionated. For example: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/ http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/ and http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/ http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/