Off-topic, but I'm always looking for hour long talks/videos to put on while I'm cooking and I can't sit at a computer, or my hands are too dirt to finger a book. Thanks HN for giving me good content! I maintain a list of these and they come up sufficiently often enough that I always have something to watch when I have to cook.
I've been doing a HN search for youtube|vimeo|video as a poor man's version of HackerNewsTV for years. Basically with the same goal: having something to watch while cooking, eating, for siesta or to help me sleep at night
But I'd love a better UI to that data (hint to HN team)
Looking at it reminded me of my first C textbook from school; "C as a second language for native speakers of Pascal". If I recall correctly, it has a section on macros you can define to make your C code look more like Pascal - much like how Bourne preferred Algol syntax.
cd - is another nice one, cd to the last working directory (there is a powerful variant using push and pop), but with the - you don't have to remember to push at any point.
I find it pretty amazing what a tight time some of these influential and lasting designs were implemented in. Bourne joins in 1975 and by the time he gets to 1977 in the talk there is already so much industry practice solidified.
How many years have some of us written shell scripts and make files, and here he is talking about sh and make popping up within 2 years in the 1970s...
I was eager to watch this video but I found it disappointing. The presentation was disorganized and unfocused, although Bourne did have some interesting war stories about Bell Labs. A specialist in writing shells might enjoy this talk, but there wasn't much value for a generalist like me.
