561–563 of 563 posts
There was never a plot to follow; if there isn't a better name for an editor than "vi" (because "ed" is already taken) then maybe they should try getting rid of verbs too to give it more "refreshed" branding.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And these all pretty much came from an era before glass display were (affordable) in computers. A terminal was roughly a keyboard and a printer attached together, or a typewriter cut in half. Paper. No cursors. No arrow keys. Mostly after punched cards and mostly before transistors. And that was only a few decades ago, there's people still alive that have used these machines. Funny that they are still some of the mos…
FFS, I'm not that old. I'm 61. I started out at school in 1977 on a PDP-11 with 16K of RAM, 3 ASR-33s connected by 20ma current loop. We also had a VT-52. All running at 110baud. No valves, all transistors and ICs. That system was already outdated. Punched/mark sense cards were still around. Two years later we had a PET, Apple-II, and a TRS-80. Teletypes have been around since the 1940s. Cut the false history crap wh…
> grep (global regular expression print), awk (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan; the creators’ initials), sed (stream editor), cat (concatenate), diff (difference). Even when abbreviated, these names were either functional descriptions or systematic derivations. If you asked someone unfamiliar with unix tools what they thought each of these commands did, diff is the only one which they would have even the slightest chance…
Nitpick: Correct me if wrong but I think cat is catenate not concatenate IMHO, the best names are the ones that are easiest to type. I have read several accounts of authors choosing names for this reason I sometimes rename other peoples' executables (cf. libraries), not the ones in the traditional UNIX userland, but the ones with goofy names.^1 I will rename them to something I find easier to type and less annoying.…
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