Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com