> if I wanted to do a simple find-and-replace on my 2021 M1, I'd have to use something like grep (a tool originally written by Ken Thompson in 1973—a half century before my laptop was built) and look up flags and syntax I inevitably constantly forget. We should have been past this at least 15 years ago.

Pretty much any text editor worth its salt has find and replace, regex compatible, features. Even the extremely rudimentary TextEdit on your MacBook supports it.

The fact that foundational tools like grep still work over half a century later is a feature, not a bug, of our field.

How many cloud based services (most if not all of which rely on those foundational half-a-century-old building blocks, by the way) that are pushed to customers today will still be around in half a century?