Doug McIlroy makes my day
<p>Yeah, that&#8217;d be <em>the</em> Doug McIlroy.  Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie&#8217;s boss when they were inventing Unix, himself one of its early co-designers, and the inventor of the Unix pipe.</p>
<p>He was very helpful when I was doing <cite>The Art of Unix Programming</cite> in 2003.  Hadn&#8217;t heard from him since then until he emailed me out of the blue today to say good things about the manual I wrote for GNU PIC.  Good Web rendering <a href="http://floppsie.comp.glam.ac.uk/Glamorgan/gaius/web/pic.html">here</a>; googling may turn up other copies.</p>
<p>He said:</p>
<blockquote><p>
I just read your manual for gnu pic.  It&#8217;s a great job.<br />
I&#8217;ve found that almost invariably follow-on descriptions of<br />
Unix are either (1) too verbose or (2) too incomplete.  When I<br />
saw the page count I instinctively assigned this document to<br />
category 1.  But I had to read it, for man pic on Linux is<br />
category 2.  Only after I had finished and revised my opinion<br />
to &#8220;this is a real keeper&#8221; did I go back to the title page to<br />
see who wrote it.
</p></blockquote>
<p>Praise from the master is praise indeed.  I am a happy Eric today.</p>
<p>I haven&#8217;t felt quite like this since Donald Knuth emailed me a bug fix for INTERCAL&#8230;</p>
