> 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.

▲ ohdeardear 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

▲

jacquesm 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

▲

ohdeardear 26 minutes ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	jacquesm 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.