Yeah, huge early adopter of lex and yacc. Really drove the potential of pipes. He’d take half baked ideas and show Thompson, Richie, et al the real potential.

Yeah, huge early adopter of lex and yacc. Really drove the potential of pipes. He’d take half baked ideas and show Thompson, Richie, et al the real potential. Kicked off many late nights of their inspired work. Such a supportive human being, too. I’ve been using awk for 20 years, and when I read his memoir I had a light bulb go off and really got it like I never had before. Such an amazingly powerful tool. He’s an incredible writer. So many of his books have demystified things that were vague to me. I still read his papers that use real terminals, etc. because I always obtain some kind of mini enlightenment moment. The Unix Programming Environment is so great and the books he supervised like TCP/IP Illustrated by Stevens. I keep the first volume of the latter on my desk to show “that’s not how that works.” Those diagrams <3.