Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!elroy!cit-vax!beckenba
From: beckenba@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (Joe Beckenbach)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Who builds tools?
Message-ID: <6273@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: 26 Apr 88 17:31:27 GMT
References: <321@uwslh.UUCP> <40335UH2@PSUVM>
Reply-To: beckenba@cit-vax.UUCP (Joe Beckenbach)
Organization: California Institute of Technology
Lines: 23

In article <40335UH2@PSUVM> UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer) writes:
> [...]
>Put in a broader perspective, maybe every project ought to have someone
>who, while not being good at the techniques the final code will contain,
>IS good with tools and tool building.  In the traditional Unix environment,
>a project should contain at least one person whose *specialty* is awk, emacs,
>shell, yacc, etc etc etc.

	While I was working under a professor of Computer Science here on
a long-term project [ie 20 years so far] there was one grad student who
held essentially that position informally. I'm starting to learn about the
power of sed and other unixtools, mainly because I've seen some of the
stuff he cooked up. The piece of work which, when I first encountered it
and said "It's magic!", blew my mind was a little one-line shell command
in a makefile. It invoked sed on the makefile itself, used sed to locate
all the pascal include dependencies on the vax, appended those to the
makefile, cleaned up after itself, and quit. Back then, the concept of
makefiles was keen stuff to me, green as I was [am]. He also did a lot of
other support stuff for the rest of the design teams in this project, in
addition to his own contributions outside of the tool realm.
	When I grow up into a unix wizard, I want to do stuff JUST LIKE
THAT. :-) :-)
-- 
Joe Beckenbach	CS BS ??			-- I'D RATHER BE ORBITING