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425 points henry_flower | 1 comments | 19 Feb 25 21:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | 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]▶

>>43112034 #

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. BrendanEich ◴[23 Feb 25 06:06 UTC] No.43147076[source]▶

>>43118374 #

My understanding (direct from Graydon, some 18 years ago) was that Linus admired Monotone except for its slowness. Graydon liked making things correct then fast, but was on a break in Köln when Linus (provoked by loss of BitKeeper) emailed on Friday endorsing Monotone's design and asking for speed. Graydon said "let me buy a laptop and I'll start on Monday".

Monday rolled around and Linus said "too late, I wrote it already" (it => git).

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