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0 pointsDaishiman13y ago0 comments

From Wikipedia:

"He also co-developed the Blit graphical terminal for Unix; before that he wrote the first window system for Unix in 1981. Pike is the sole inventor named in AT&T's US patent 4,555,775 or "backing store patent" that is part of the X graphic system protocol and one of the first software patents. [1]

Over the years Pike has written many text editors; sam and acme are the most well known and are still in active use and development.

Pike, with Brian Kernighan, is the co-author of The Practice of Programming and The Unix Programming Environment. With Ken Thompson he is the co-creator of UTF-8. Pike also developed lesser systems such as the vismon program for displaying images of faces of email authors."

Yeah, some amateur engineering right there. My point still stands; heuristically I have every reason to believe an extremely competent arquitect and designer who is involved in good faith on this project over a random commententer who can't be bothered to assess the evidence.

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2 comments · 2 top-level

azth13y ago

It seems to me that Pike and gang are mainly coming from a C background. They loathe C++ and Java. Take a look at the SPLASH talk linked in another comment here, and see how the "pain points" mentioned either apply mainly to C and C++ (dependency issues, build times in the case of the latter), or are independent of the language in general (like poor documentation). Then at least 4 sections on that page are just related to dependencies and build times (about 1/3rd of the entire article).

No one is denying that C and C++ have many problems. At the same time though, many of those problems have been solved in other languages (both older and newer than C++).

papsosouid13y ago

Did you seriously not notice how nothing in your list of accomplishments is even remotely relevant? We're talking about programming language research, and Pike's experience in that area is seriously lacking.

You don't need to believe anyone, that is the whole point. You are trying to turn it into "some guy's opinion vs the glorious and all-knowing rob's opinion". It is not a question of opinion, it is one of fact. Again, this problem was solved in 1976. ML is very old. Go read the papers on parametric polymorphism.