I was just perusing through The Art Of UNIX Programming by the armed and dangerous Eric S. Raymond; when I saw this piece:

Unbelievable as it may seem to a modern reader, most of Unix’s original code was written with this (ed(1)) editor.

Holy Cow! Did I just read that UNIX was written in ed(1)?

The force of the incredible fact struck me so hard that I was led into thinking what the real programmers of lore hacked in. Blurry images of the PDP-7 and the PDP-11 sped through my hypothalamus. And they probably wrote in hex. Without errors. It is not that writing in ed(1) is impossible, it just seems plain bloody nonsensical in today’s world of WYSIWYG and Visual mode editors that have IntelliSense and syntax highlighting. Many senior UNIX hackers still maintain that anything more than ed(1) is useless and; get this–bloated. I am yet to decide whether this is excessive fanaticism or ruthlessly abiding by the UNIX principle of “every program should do only one thing, and do it well”.

I wonder if vi(1) is bloated (by inductive reasoning that anything that does more than enabling the user to create and modify plain text files is bloated – which is effectively the only thing that ed(1) does), what would Microsoft Word be termed as? Horribly kludgy blob of gigantic dinosaur turd?

Of course, UNIX hackers consider Microsoft Word beneath contempt, and most will flame you into an absolutely useless pile of smoke and dust if you even come close to pronouncing the first two syllables.

See this joke about ed(1) – actually, these guys are only half-joking. After UNIX in ed(1), nothing can surprise me. Until someone tells me that Windows was written in edlin, that is.

:-|

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