17 lines
1.3 KiB
Plaintext
17 lines
1.3 KiB
Plaintext
Doug McIlroy makes my day
|
|
<p>Yeah, that’d be <em>the</em> Doug McIlroy. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie’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’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’s a great job.<br />
|
|
I’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 “this is a real keeper” 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’t felt quite like this since Donald Knuth emailed me a bug fix for INTERCAL…</p>
|