And Thompson turns 80 this year. In what years does Thompson become old enough that you start to entertain the possibility that not everything he says or does is the result of having learned and understood all the relevant work including the recent work?
And Bell Labs was never good at designing programming languages. Did you know that in the Bourne shell (and possibly in all the other shells) you can have a statement of the form $foo = bar which will assign bar to the variable whose name is the value of foo? (Emacs Lisp, and old language, has the same functionality under function named "set", but most Emacs Lisp programmers know to avoid it.) Well, the plan 9 group think that is an OK thing to do in a workman shell script: i.e., the shell script is not doing anything fancy like interpreting a programming language or defining a new PL feature (not that it is sane to do either of things in a Unix shell).