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Comment by philipallstar | Hacker News Reader

> When was the last time that the author of "grep" was recognized as a great programmer? Never.

Ken Thompson wrote grep, and he is definitely recognised as such.

man -T grep | grep 'Free Soft\|Thom'

  (Cop)108 348 Q(yright 1998-2000, 2002, 2005-2023 Free Softw)-.1 E(are F)

Sure, he wrote _a_ version of grep, and probably the first, but who cares? "The" (sure, you might run some bsd grep) current version of grep certainly doesn't.

No, he wrote grep. Before he wrote it there was no grep. And yes, he's recognized as a great programmer. With Multics, Unix, B, C, UTF-8 Plan9, Inferno and grep to his name (and probably others that I forgot) he has more than deserved that.

Future grep versions, including the FSF one, were all re-implementations.

Your statement in the GP is nonsensical.

I do not agree he was a great programmer. All of his programs are trivial from a computer science perspective.

In fact, you can quite easily check this by trying to let an LLM generate a program like grep. It can do that. Now, there also exist programs for which LLMs can't generate code, because it's too complex.

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. And that's fine but it is kind of adding a lot of noise and zero signal.

I'm just saying this is incorrect:

> When was the last time that the author of "grep" was recognized as a great programmer? Never.

He is recognised as that. Your opinion on him is nothing to do with anything.

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