4 ms·
It’s a pretty common quote from Introducing Regular Expressions (2012) by Michael Fitzgerald, used as a quip.
by donatj 6y ago
It’s a pretty common quote from Introducing Regular Expressions (2012) by Michael Fitzgerald, used as a quip.
- oblio 6y agoHe he, recency bias, I guess? It's from The Art of Unix Programming (2003) by Eric S. Raymond. It's actually in the first chapter. And the supposedly original quote is: > Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. > -- Henry Spencer Usenet signature, November 1987 http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/philosophychapter.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/philosophychapt... Henry Spencer being: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer . I imagine that's why the quote is also in that regexp book. It's a super arrogant quote used, I'd say, 95% of the time by people who don't deeply know other OSes (besides shallow memes and jokes about them).
- cb321 6y agoThe general structure of the quip/aphorism/joke/snark pre-dates the industrial revolution dating back (at least!) to Edmund Burke's [1] "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke
- oblio 6y agoYeah, I know, but the difference is that Burke was actually right :-D
- mixmastamyk 6y agoSounds similar to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana Looks like Burke lived a century+ earlier.
- Koshkin 6y agoEven less recently, we have had a very similar sounding Greenspun’s Tenth Rule.
- oblio 6y agoThe Common Lisp one? Another arrogant and these days probably outdated quote that's sometimes trotted out on the internet.
- rbanffy 6y agoI have seen more than one generation say this and then, after a while, attain enlightenment. Feel free to be the next one.
- oblio 6y agoProgramming languages are tools. Tools need to be used to build wonderful works of art or industry to be useful or have any realistic shot at being considered great tools. The fact that the overwhelming majority of great applications, services, any kind of software we create is not written in Lisp should at some point in the first century after the creation of Lisp, lead Lisp afficionados to some kind of enlightenment, one would hope. Unlikely, since it's already been 60 years, so they only have 40 years left.
- Koshkin 6y ago> outdated No, CL's popularity hasn't changed over the past 30 years.
- oblio 6y agoYes, you're completely right. The same people using in 1990 are using it today.
- donatj 6y agoLOL, I knew I knew the quote, didn’t remember from where and WikiQuote gave me that source. Should be corrected but I’m on mobile at the moment, I’ll do so later if no one does in the meantime. That’ll teach me to trust the internet. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Unix https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Unix
- leoc 6y agoTAOUP didn't make it famous: it was probably about as well known as it is now well before 2003. The cited Usenet post is real https://groups.google.com/g/sci.space.shuttle/c/L8-Upf8gZoY/m/NN6ngTI0K0QJ https://groups.google.com/g/sci.space.shuttle/c/L8-Upf8gZoY/... .
- underwater 6y agoThe OP had identified problems with the existing approach, and proposed a concrete solution in detail. Dismissing that with a pithy quote because it vaguely matches a common pattern is low effort and needlessly dismissive. The quote stinks anyway. Unix is not the pinnacle of computing.