He he, recency bias, I guess?

It's from The Art of Unix Programming (2003) by Eric S. Raymond. It's actually in the first chapter. And the supposedly original quote is:

> Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

> -- Henry Spencer Usenet signature, November 1987

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/philosophychapt...

Henry Spencer being: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer . I imagine that's why the quote is also in that regexp book.

It's a super arrogant quote used, I'd say, 95% of the time by people who don't deeply know other OSes (besides shallow memes and jokes about them).

The general structure of the quip/aphorism/joke/snark pre-dates the industrial revolution dating back (at least!) to Edmund Burke's [1] "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke

Sounds similar to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana

Looks like Burke lived a century+ earlier.

Yeah, I know, but the difference is that Burke was actually right :-D

LOL, I knew I knew the quote, didn’t remember from where and WikiQuote gave me that source. Should be corrected but I’m on mobile at the moment, I’ll do so later if no one does in the meantime. That’ll teach me to trust the internet.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Unix

TAOUP didn't make it famous: it was probably about as well known as it is now well before 2003. The cited Usenet post is real https://groups.google.com/g/sci.space.shuttle/c/L8-Upf8gZoY/... .

Even less recently, we have had a very similar sounding Greenspun’s Tenth Rule.

The Common Lisp one? Another arrogant and these days probably outdated quote that's sometimes trotted out on the internet.

I have seen more than one generation say this and then, after a while, attain enlightenment. Feel free to be the next one.

Programming languages are tools. Tools need to be used to build wonderful works of art or industry to be useful or have any realistic shot at being considered great tools.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of great applications, services, any kind of software we create is not written in Lisp should at some point in the first century after the creation of Lisp, lead Lisp afficionados to some kind of enlightenment, one would hope.

Unlikely, since it's already been 60 years, so they only have 40 years left.

> outdated

No, CL's popularity hasn't changed over the past 30 years.

Yes, you're completely right. The same people using in 1990 are using it today.

The OP had identified problems with the existing approach, and proposed a concrete solution in detail. Dismissing that with a pithy quote because it vaguely matches a common pattern is low effort and needlessly dismissive. The quote stinks anyway. Unix is not the pinnacle of computing.