Re: [TUHS] Isaacson v Unix [really RMS bashing]

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Sun, Jan 06, 2019 at 08:38:45PM -0500, Toby Thain wrote:
> On 2019-01-06 6:41 PM, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> > ...
> > As others have said, I don't conflate coding prowess with the ability to
> > design.  I've had many an argument with John Gilmore (one of the people
> > who doesn't mind footing the cleaning and repair bill after allowing RMS
> > to stay at his place) where he begins with "When I wrote GNU tar..."  I've
> > always responded by saying that writing tar is no big deal; the specification
> > was the hard part.
> > 
> 
> Hear, hear. I'd aver this is very much the case in any typical
> software-related day job, and _definitely_ mine.

Yep.  The spec is hard, the code is easy.  That is a pattern.

I've been the guy behind decent sized projects, BitKeeper is 2673371
lines of code.  Getting to a spec was hard, writing the code was easy.
We were a tiny distributed team of about 10 engineers, the hard part was
agreeing on a design.  Which we did by getting on the phone and talking
about what we talked about yesterday.  We passed the idea between people
and when we could do the pass back and forth and nothing had changed
from the previous pass, we had a design.  Coding that was just typing.

It's very similar to what Udi Manber told me as an under grad, he said
writing papers is easy.  Not for me.  But I came to understand that
papers are two things: a big base of knowledge and an outline.  If you
have those two then the paper is just typing.  He was right.