amen zwa, esq.

I saw this segment on YouTube, in which #Fridman interviewed #Kernighan about his #programming setup. For an instant, I was surprised to learn that Fridman hadn't heard of #UNIX \(\texttt{ed}\), but then I realised....

In my view, a luminary like Kernighan, from a certain era, should be interviewed by someone who wouldn't be stunned when hearing once-common names like \(\texttt{ed}\) or \(\texttt{ex}\) or \(\texttt{dc}\) or \(\texttt{adb}\), but would smoothly inject a brief historical description thereof, and glide on with the main point of the interview. But that 1970s/1980s #geek generation avoids the YouTube selfie camera like the plague.

https://youtu.be/EF2-vcp1Te0?si=87w4vmkQMBEuWF5i

Brian Kernighan's Programming Setup | Lex Fridman

YouTube
Oct 7, 2024 at 8:04pmWeb
Show threadDougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)Oct 7, 2024

@AmenZwa
I no longer remember details, but I remember once thinking adb had at least a few pluses over gdb.

I never got around to reading about AMPL, do you know anything about it? (I take for granted that if you do, then you also have strong opinions about that ;)

Lex Fridman is, what, just another popular youtube interviewer? Some people actually study computer history, but I suppose there's a lot to know.

Show threadamen zwa, esq.Oct 8, 2024

@dougmerritt Everyone I knew who used "adb" used it in the context of debugging the UNIX kernel. I used it only in the OS class I took in the 1980s, which was still taught on the PDP-11. But for ordinary C programmes, it's all "db", and later "dbx".

I've never used AMPL, so I can't comment on it. I first came across it in, I think, the early 1990s, at the suggestion of the government sponsor of our research. But my uni didn't have the license, and we already had Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB. So, that was that.