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.

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ohdeardear 2 hours 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.

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jacquesm 2 hours 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.

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ohdeardear 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I have a research degree in computer science from one of the best universities on the planet, I have been using Unix systems for over 25 years, have been the go to person for billion dollar companies (you know the person they beg for help), and I don't know what I am talking about?

I have even used Plan9 and the silly editor.

I probably have forgotten more than you (or Thompson) has ever known.

Thompson is an amateur, because all of his programs are of "trust me, bro"-quality. Call me when Ken (and all the n00bs from that era) grows up and implements grep in Rocq.

	▲	jacquesm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, so you say, and I'm the pope on alternate Sundays. Meanwhile, I highly doubt you are qualified to polish Thompson's shoes, all I see is an AC novelty account making dumb claims with hindsight. Anyway, enough with you, off to the ignore list.