[aklug] Re: Breaking News Flash

For more tl;dr hilarity:

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5841.txt

Bob Crosby wrote:
> *C and Unix were just a big prank!*
> In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson,
> Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating
> system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April
> Fools prank kept alive for over 40 years. Speaking at the recent Linux
> Development Forum in Helsinki, Thompson revealed the following:
>
> "In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the GE/Honeywell/AT&T
> Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early
> release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH labs in
> Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power.
> Dennis had just finished reading 'Bored of the Rings', a hilarious
> National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien 'Lord of the Rings'
> trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment
> and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating environment.
> We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and
> cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration levels,
> calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risqu�
> allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of
> Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were actually trying to create
> real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and
> evolved into B, BCPL and finally C.
>
> We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:
>
> for(;P("\n"),R--;P("|"))for(e=C;e--;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("|"+(*u/4)%2);
>
> To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that
> allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually
> thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science
> progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and other
> US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It took them 20
> years to develop enough expertise to generate even marginally useful
> applications using this 1960's technological parody, but we are
> impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the general Unix
> and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have been working
> exclusively in Ada on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years and
> feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly bad programming
> that have resulted from our silly prank so long ago."
>
> Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including Nokia, HP and Intel
> have refused comment at this time. Microsoft, a leading vendor of BASIC
> and C tools, including the popular VB.NET and C#, stated they had
> suspected this for a number of years. They look forward to enhanced
> reliability and speed in Windows 8. It will be re-written from the
> ground up in VB.NET and is due out sometime this decade. An IBM
> spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a hastily
> convened news conference concerning the fate of the Blue Gene/V, merely
> stating 'VM will be available Real Soon Now'. A Sun Microsystems
> spokeswoman merely sipped her java and smiled enigmatically. In a
> cryptic statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of
> the Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that
> P. T. Barnum was correct.
>
>
>
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-- 
Adam
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