Smedley be good

[Ol' Doc Weemba]

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Somebody told me there were some real silly flames going on in this
group, and by gosh, there were.  They are inspiring, in a negative
sort of way, though, so I thought I'd tell you about a certain very
bright mathematician around these here parts.  The following is a
true story.  I'm not joshin' you folks.

Smedley (not his real name) is fluent in several languages.  Not
computer languages--he doesn't even know BASIC.  Like I said, he's
real bright, but he's got other things to do.  Like mathematics.  Or
learn Chinese linguistics or how to count in Eskimo.  He writes his
papers in troff using vi.  I should point out when I say troff, I mean
troff.  He don't touch eqn or tbl--they don't come out right, so he
works with the naked stuff.

Of course, he knows and uses every damned feature of vi in the book.
He keeps running into vi bugs all the time--some of them quite out of
the way--and some as simple as 5^B.  (Amazing thing about that last
bug.  I always typed ^B^B^B etc. til I got to where I was going.  But
Smedley had to get there by binary search.  The guy's an up an' comer,
now ain't he?)

Anyway, he's got aliases galore.  He loves aliases and macros.  And
that's how he programs at the shell level too.  Alias after alias.
It's amazing.  Not even a two or three line shell script in his work.
Have you ever escaped your escape for the escape for the escape for a
little diddly quotation mark that had to survive multiple multiple
interpretations down the line?  Be honest now.  Smedley does it all
the time.  He even has abbreviations for different levels of quoting
squirrelled away for later.

Well, enough of this preramble.  Smedley once sent out a simple alias
on our local math messages, to extract a consecutive block of lines
from a file.  A trivial tail into head pipeline.  So I told him that
sed would do a cleaner job, and this interested him.  "Sed?  What's
that?"  Well, I had to explain about the stream editor, and how it's
just like ex, without the chance to go back, and not too hard to use
once you get past the initial appearances.

You have to realize, I didn't really care about his little alias, but
damned if it ain't galling to see people be so damned inefficient all
the time.  Yup, I thought Smedley would get a kick out of learning
sed.

And so he did.  Next day he had the tower of hanoi up and running in
a recursive sed script.  Dangedest thing I ever did saw.  Yup, we all
know it's SOP for emacs, but somehow it just ain't the same thing.
And this from a man who hadn't ever written a "Hello World" program
in his life.

I don't know if this story has got a moral or not, but really fellas,
real programmers will edit on a card punch if need be.  And as for
Smedley, well, some day I'm going to learn ol' Smedley some awk.  It
might even come in handy.

Ol' Doc Weemba
ucbvax!brahms!weemba

PS-While I still have your eyeballs, I thought you might be interested
in a little bit of trivia Smedley once told me.  It seems that, ain't
this a riot, according to the Greek Orthodox Church calender, the year
2900 is going to be a leap year after all.