Stephen Bourne: Early days of Unix and design of sh [video]
youtube.comOff-topic, but I'm always looking for hour long talks/videos to put on while I'm cooking and I can't sit at a computer, or my hands are too dirt to finger a book. Thanks HN for giving me good content! I maintain a list of these and they come up sufficiently often enough that I always have something to watch when I have to cook.
I've been doing a HN search for youtube|vimeo|video as a poor man's version of HackerNewsTV for years. Basically with the same goal: having something to watch while cooking, eating, for siesta or to help me sleep at night
But I'd love a better UI to that data (hint to HN team)
Would be nice to have a ?type=video filter on the URL or something like that
Can you share that stash with us perhaps?
mlvljr: your account seems to be banned, or something.
Working out or ironing clothes, also.
http://contalks.reddit.com I try to post up as many talks as I can find.
Would you mind sharing your list? I like to have a good talk in the background when I work.
Videos from software conferences are excellent for this job.
btw, pdf slides here (first 'slide' link, not the last one): http://www.bsdcan.org/2015/schedule/events/612.en.html (https://archive.is/gforA)
ps: Going back even further (multics), Louis Pouzin part in the idea of a shell http://www.multicians.org/shell.html (https://archive.is/zVtQ8)
Damn interesting, that second link on the Multics shell. Thanks for both.
You're welcome. And just in case you didn't know Louis Pouzin, he also invented the datagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pouzin, a funny fellow :)
I very recently found about his love for C macros
Looking at it reminded me of my first C textbook from school; "C as a second language for native speakers of Pascal". If I recall correctly, it has a section on macros you can define to make your C code look more like Pascal - much like how Bourne preferred Algol syntax.
At which point you wonder if you're writing C code anymore. There's also the king's way http://www.merl.com/publications/docs/TR93-17.pdf
I find it pretty amazing what a tight time some of these influential and lasting designs were implemented in. Bourne joins in 1975 and by the time he gets to 1977 in the talk there is already so much industry practice solidified.
How many years have some of us written shell scripts and make files, and here he is talking about sh and make popping up within 2 years in the 1970s...
I was eager to watch this video but I found it disappointing. The presentation was disorganized and unfocused, although Bourne did have some interesting war stories about Bell Labs. A specialist in writing shells might enjoy this talk, but there wasn't much value for a generalist like me.
Cambridge: computer algebra and John Conway's Game of Life on a PDP7. Pretty good preparation...
...thanks for posting
Thanks for this.
He sounds like Arthur C Clarke!