Monktoberfest 2016: Bryan Cantrill - Oral Tradition in Software Engineering

I’m surprised I haven’t seen this linked yet, but Bryan Cantrill of dtrace, Sun, lawnmower, Joyent, etc, fame gave an amazing talk for Monktoberfest 2016, titled “Oral Tradition in Software Engineering”, which features The Story of Mel [1]. Highly recommend checking it out — there are loads of little gems and stories like this throughout. All of his other presentations are great too and definitely worth a listen if you like this sort of thing [2]. A couple of my favorites are “Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of Illumos” [3] and “Debugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind” [4]. [1]: [this video] [2]: [link] [3]: [link] [4]: [link]

One of my favorite XOR stories is from Bryan Cantrill (of Oxide, Joyent, and Sun) in this presentation [0] and this video [1]. To avoid clicking a link: When he was at Sun, he was chatting with a coworker (Roger Faulkner) about the lack of logical XOR in C. Faulkner said it was because you couldn't short circuit it, and Brian thought that was wild. Then Roger emailed Dennis Ritchie to ask and he confirmed it was what Faulkner had said. That stories gets me every time! First of all, it's very funny and well delivered by Cantrill, but it's also just so incredible that they could ask the man himself. [0] [link] [1] [this video]

I had the rare privilege of pair-programming 40 hours a week for several years early in my career. This follows the extreme programming ethos of "everything in the limit," where pairing is "code review in the limit" and "mentorship in the limit," to say nothing of the oral tradition it imparts[0]. Even pair-programming with my fellow juniors was both more productive and more educational than a rubber duck[1]. I had the opportunity to sit down to dinner with some very junior devs at a family gathering, recently, and to hear of their isolation due to remote-work broke my heart. They simply have no idea what they're missing. 0. [this video] 1. [link]

The question that I'm curious about is "why does POSIX require unary negation to have a higher precedence?" Was it a "this is the way that bc worked in the 70s because it was easier to write a parser for it?" or was there some more underlying reason for the "this problem gets really icky if unary negation has lower precedence than the binary operators and makes for other expressions that become less reasonable?" It's like the Logical XOR issue ( [this video] ) ... and I'm of the opinion that there's a real reason why this design choice was made. (Aside: Some other historical "why things work that way" touching on dc's place in history: Ken Thompson interviewed by Brian Kernighan at VCF East 2019 [link] - it goes on to pipes and dc makes an appearance there again)