[tsukurimashou]

I don't think it is very "hard" to "destroy" most of these programs, they were written a long time ago, they evolved with backwards compatibility or portability in mind, these can run on pretty much any system. It does seem a bit unfair to compare it to a quickly hacked together program that you test against one use case.

Like the other said, the second article will probably be more interesting.

[StavrosK]

But multiple people have been working full time on wc for decades! At least, if you believe the article.

[iainmerrick]

Decades yes, but who said “full time”?

[joosters]

I've been working full time on 'wc' for only the last five years, since being promoted from full time working on 'cat'.

Once I've wrung every last drop of performance out of wc, I can move on to the next largest limiting factor in GNU performance, 'tail' :-)

[StavrosK]

That's what "decades of man-hours" means.