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1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected

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425 points henry_flower | 2 comments | 19 Feb 25 21:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.417s | source
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m4r1k ◴[20 Feb 25 07:27 UTC] No.43112034[source]▶
I once saw a talk from Brian Kernighan who made a joke about how in three weeks Ken Thompson wrote a text editor, the B compiler, and the skeleton for managing input/output files, which turned out to be UNIX. The joke was that nowadays we're a bit less efficient :-D
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mr_toad ◴[20 Feb 25 18:38 UTC] No.43118374[source]▶
I’ve heard that Torvalds build Git in 5 (or 10) days and that Brendan Eich created JavaScript in 10 days.

Maybe the average programmer is less efficient, but the distribution is probably heavily skewed these days.

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1. wbl ◴[20 Feb 25 21:04 UTC] No.43120165[source]▶
Brendan Eich would say "10 days" whenever one of the big warts from the that are unfixable came up.
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2. BrendanEich ◴[22 Feb 25 08:07 UTC] No.43137149[source]▶
The Mocha prototype was better than what I did after the ten days. The biggest wart, == implicitly converting operand types, came after the ten days and was me being an idiot by agreeing with early inside-Netscape adopter requests for slop.

Ryan Dahl gave a speech decades later saying "don't do them" when you are tempted to add little features that might be "cute": https://youtu.be/M3BM9TB-8yA?t=900.

Unfixability is a property of the Web and applies to CSS and HTML as well as JS.