>> I know we have some faculty on this list. Please talk to your students :-)
>
> regarding the madness of making complex software (that time, it was
> about configure).
>
> I have allocated half of the presentation lecture for this semester to
> "Why does this matter at all". Among other things,
> I´ll be comparing gnu cat.c with plan 9 cat.c, so they get the picture.
>
> Any other suggestion?
i think the devolution of gnu grep is quite instructive. once upon a time
it was simple and very fast. (thanks, mike.) today it is neither.
the last time i tried to fix a utf-8 problem (it was 80 times slower
processing utf8 than ascii), i gave up after encountering dozens of
if(special char set){fast version}else{slow version} constructions.
it gets to the heart of why plan9's invention and use (thank's rob, ken) of
utf-8 is so great.
and speaking of regular expressions, one could use russ' excellent work
on perl regular expressions vs. plan 9 regular expressions to talk about
how seemingly straightforward extensions are not always Mostly Harmless;
complexity is a sneaky thing.
- erik
