Scsh Acknowledgements (1994)

I had to look up if he's ok, three decades later. It appears so: https://www.khoury.northeastern.edu/people/olin-shivers/ and https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/professor/923911.

For some reason I love that piece of writing. Many sentences, like

>My God, no one could blame me -- no one! -- if I went off the edge and just lost it completely one day.

really resonated with my younger self. If course I didn't really think any of this things (like the author didn't), but there's something cathartic in this.

Also I respect the author for just doing what he felt at a time and going along it, even though it is obviously not the best move for one's career. We are not just or jobs. This is also something I aspire to.

  1.8  A word about Unix standards

  ``The wonderful thing about Unix standards is that there are so many to choose from.'' You may be totally bewildered about the multitude of various standards that exist. Rest assured that nowhere in this manual will you encounter an attempt to spell it all out for you; you could not read and internalise such a twisted account without bleeding from the nose and ears.

  However, you might keep in mind the following simple fact: of all the standards, POSIX is the least common denominator. So when this manual repeatedly refers to POSIX, the point is ``the thing we are describing should be portable just about anywhere.'' Scsh sticks to POSIX when at all possible; its major departure is symbolic links, which aren't in POSIX (see -- it really is a least common denominator).

I often get nostalgic for the old days, but it could be pretty terrible.

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21668685

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21668685