"If you have a vague recollection of the internals of a Unix program, this does not absolutely mean you can’t write an imitation of it, but do try to organize t

"If you have a vague recollection of the internals of a Unix program, this does not absolutely mean you can’t write an imitation of it, but do try to organize the imitation internally along different lines, because this is likely to make the details of the Unix version irrelevant and dissimilar to your results. " on it's own, not intentionally obfuscating. but when the naive implementation is straightforward and the only clear cut way, and everything else involves abstracting something, then yes. see also the 'yes' example from the other thread: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/yes.c https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/yes.c https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/usr.bin/yes/yes.c https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/usr.bin/yes/yes.c Really, my main beef is the suppression of history and misrepresentation of a broader culture as 'proprietary' to serve RMS's political aims, whereas in the actual Usenet/BSD culture, it quite simply wasn't. Unix wasn't just AT&T, it was the community around it as well, which lives on in the BSD's with a clear lineage and 'cultural context' which is also truly open source and built around software freedom, but the promotion of GNU devoid of context obscures this fact.