{"id":875,"date":"2009-03-18T11:33:59","date_gmt":"2009-03-18T16:33:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=875"},"modified":"2009-03-18T11:39:09","modified_gmt":"2009-03-18T16:39:09","slug":"doug-mcilroy-makes-my-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=875","title":{"rendered":"Doug McIlroy makes my day"},"content":{"rendered":"<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>\n<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>\n<p>He said:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nI just read your manual for gnu pic.  It&#8217;s a great job.<br \/>\nI&#8217;ve found that almost invariably follow-on descriptions of<br \/>\nUnix are either (1) too verbose or (2) too incomplete.  When I<br \/>\nsaw the page count I instinctively assigned this document to<br \/>\ncategory 1.  But I had to read it, for man pic on Linux is<br \/>\ncategory 2.  Only after I had finished and revised my opinion<br \/>\nto &#8220;this is a real keeper&#8221; did I go back to the title page to<br \/>\nsee who wrote it.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Praise from the master is praise indeed.  I am a happy Eric today.<\/p>\n<p>I haven&#8217;t felt quite like this since Donald Knuth emailed me a bug fix for INTERCAL&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yeah, that&#8217;d be the 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. He was very helpful when I was doing The Art of Unix Programming in 2003. Hadn&#8217;t heard from him since then until he emailed me&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=875\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Doug McIlroy makes my day<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=875"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":878,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875\/revisions\/878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}