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>The original authors of yacc were Mike Lesk and Eric Schmidt - yes that Eric Schmidt. Incorrect, they were authors of lex. yacc was authored by Stephen Johnso
by npalli 1y ago
>The original authors of yacc were Mike Lesk and Eric Schmidt - yes that Eric Schmidt.
Incorrect, they were authors of lex. yacc was authored by Stephen Johnson.
Surprising to me is all the authors are still around, even though the tools are over 50 years old!. Shows how young computer science field is.
- musicale 1y agoWho coauthored "The C Programming Language" anyway? Oh right, prof. Kernighan. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/ https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/
- cestith 1y agoThe “k” in awk, of course. I’ve never met Kernighan or Weinberger personally. I did have a great conversation once with Al Aho and Larry Wall, largely about the history and mutual influence of programming languages upon one another.
- tapirl 1y ago[flagged]
- orthoxerox 1y agoyes, that Eric Schmidt.
- tapirl 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gthompson512 1y ago@dang I feel like this is getting close to the lowest level of discourse and occurs somewhat often these days where people overly reference the output of some AI and then are challenging the results without googling. I feel a proper hacker ethos would spur someone to find a real answer. So in honor of the name of the site maybe disallow refutations or other dismissals of a submission based on the output of an AI or overly long discussion that is offtopic about an AI?
- dang 1y agoTom and I of course agree! But it's not so easy to disallow things, since humans do $thing anyway. Most probably the long-term solution is for the community to express this preference by flagging comments that do this. I think we see signs of that happening, which is good, because a community solution is better than a technical solution (and way better than an authority solution) any day. Btw, tapirl is a good contributor and I don't think they did anything particularly wrong. It just takes time for us all to learn the optimal patterns together.
- tomhow 1y agoPlease don't do this. We don't want HN comments that are just copies of/pointers to LLM output.
- shrubble 1y agoEric Schmidt had a career at Sun Microsystems, though he is better known for Google of course.
- npalli 1y agoyeah, he was 20 when he co-authored lex. Had a good career at Sun and was brought into Google as adult supervision and that was 20 years ago! Kind of living example of the (almost) entire history of computing.