Stephen Bourne: Early days of Unix and design of sh

[Sven Mascheck]

Here is a video of a recent talk from Stephen Bourne (at BSDCan 2015),
"Early days of Unix and design of sh",

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kEJoWfobpA

The traditional Bourne shell is famous both for its powerful inventions
and its quirks (e.g., quoting, internal memory management). The talk is
both enlightening and entertaining about some background.

PS: the slides are here
www.bsdcan.org/2015/schedule/attachments/306_srbBSDCan2015.pdf

[Eric]

Thankyou! Fun and useful.

Eric
--
ms fnd in a lbry

[Martijn Dekker]

In article <mo49m2...@news.in-ulm.de>,

Sven Mascheck <masc...@in-ulm.de> wrote:

> Here is a video of a recent talk from Stephen Bourne (at BSDCan 2015),
> "Early days of Unix and design of sh",
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kEJoWfobpA
>
> The traditional Bourne shell is famous both for its powerful inventions
> and its quirks (e.g., quoting, internal memory management). The talk is
> both enlightening and entertaining about some background.

I agree with that assessment, but at the same time I thought the talk
was kind of weak, too. There was not a lot in the way of structure and
he's often a bit vague on the specifics. Some of the time he didn't seem
to understand his own slides (he outright said so on the slide about
case ... esac). Some things were conspicuously absent, such a discussion
of how the test/[ command came about (I'd have loved to know where the
idea came from to make the [ command so misleadingly resemble shell
syntax). He's also rather casually dismissive of additions that POSIX,
ksh and bash have made, and zsh doesn't even get a mention.

But I still enjoyed watching it and it was still an entertaining and
informative talk about the history of the original sh design.

- M.