From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <88ec1a25417025b5f86c7cdf76b249ff@quanstro.net>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] simplicity
From: erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>
Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2007 23:23:28 -0400
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>> I know we have some faculty on this list. Please talk to your students=
 :-)
>=20
> regarding the madness of making complex software (that time, it was
> about configure).
>=20
> I have allocated  half of the presentation lecture for this semester to
> "Why does this matter at all". Among other things,
> I=C2=B4ll be comparing gnu cat.c with plan 9 cat.c, so they get the pic=
ture.
>=20
> Any other suggestion?

i think the devolution of gnu grep is quite instructive.  once upon a tim=
e
it was simple and very fast.  (thanks, mike.)  today it is neither.

the last time i tried to fix a utf-8 problem (it was 80 times slower
processing utf8 than ascii), i gave up after encountering dozens of
if(special char set){fast version}else{slow version} constructions.

it gets to the heart of why plan9's invention and use (thank's rob, ken) =
of
utf-8 is so great.

and speaking of regular expressions, one could use russ' excellent work
on perl regular expressions vs. plan 9 regular expressions to talk about
how seemingly straightforward extensions are not always Mostly Harmless;
complexity is a sneaky thing.

- erik