Glory of the Old School

Brian Kernighan, the co-worker of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, the author of The Unix Programming Environment, the developer of AWK etc gave an informative talk: The Unix Legacy

This forerunner traced back the origin of Unix, showed the simplicity and elegance of original Unix design, for example, pipe and grep. He also commented GNU implementation as the bloating instance, such as cat and wc. At the end of the speech, he demonstrated the vista of Unix, and the spirit behind the Unix.

Personally, I do not 100% agree the functionalities bloating. With 8k memory in the original design, lots of functionalities are trimmed down to fit the small memory footprint; while with more advanced hardware available, the developers could take care of the voice from the minority. Support of multiple byte encoding in wc may seem redundant for western European users, but it really make more sense to the CJK users. It is really hard to make the tradeoff between the number of similar applications of the length of the man pages.

The illustrated photo is also shot by Treo 650, so it is with the podcast, – a good and bad show case how versatile Treo 650 is in multimedia.