[foobarian]

> It's amazing to hear they put it together in one night at a diner! :-D

I guess you're saying that in good humor. But I'll add this because it makes me appreciate how these things happen:

> What happened was this. We had used the original UTF from ISO 10646 to make Plan 9 support 16-bit characters, but we hated it.

"We hated it" -- there is just so much going on in those 3 words. They could have been suffering with the previous state for a year for all we know. And even if not, to know you hate something just takes a lot of system building experience to get to. And then when opportunity struck they probably already had a laundry list of grievances they had built up over that time and were ready to pounce.

[jrochkind1]

Yes, exactly!

If they hadn't had on-the-ground experience of the plan-9 version, and been able to see what parts of it they wanted to keep and what parts needed to be done different from that actual experience...

Often you can't build the polished thing until you have experienced the thing before.

Lately I get discouraged that there seems to be not so much attention to "prior art" in software development, that's the only way to make progress!

[danesparza]

But to build it in 4 days!

This still strikes me as the height of 1990s programming moxy.

[axaxs]

While the design is nice, it doesn't seem -that- earthshattering that it was done in four days. Once you make the realiziation that 'wait, ascii only needs the lower 7 bits, let's work off that', it's all just details past that.

Don't get me wrong, I love UTF-8 and it is well thought out and designed. But the end result is not so complicated, so much so that pretty much anyone reading the rules could understand it.

I think there was just a lot of low hanging fruit in the 90s that doesn't exist today, as they are solved problems. Today's 'amazing' things would involve image recognition or processing, self driving cars, better ML/AI algos. Things that are hard to impossible to be done by a guy or two over the weekend.

Sadly, as a result, I think we'll have fewer 'programming heroes' than existed in previous decades.

[throw0101a]

> While the design is nice, it doesn't seem -that- earthshattering that it was done in four days.

And yet it may have needed a genius to desgin and write something so simple. UTF-8 was not the first multi-lingual encoding system; here's an entire list of them, worked on by a lot of probably very smart people:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Character_encodings

It only seems 'obvious' in hindsight:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

Edit: A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. — Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[setr]

>I think there was just a lot of low hanging fruit in the 90s that doesn't exist today, as they are solved problems.

git was 2005, and that was probably similarly impactful in the version control space (in that it was much closer to fundamentally correct, than its predecessors). And there are quite a few standards out there that only survive by virtue of already having been established -- not because they meet any reasonable bar of quality. IPv4 (and all the grand schemes to work around the terror of NAT), email (the worst communication system, except for all the others), SQL (the language specifically -- a mishmash of keywords with almost no ability to properly compose), etc.

The bigger difference I think between the 90's and now is that it was probably much easier to make your new superior standard actually be used -- you could implement a new kernel today which was fantastically superior to linux, and you're much more likely than not to get zero traction (ex: plan9) simply by virtue of how well-entrenched linux already is.

[saghm]

> git was 2005

I'm not sure I'd consider git to be "low-hanging fruit"

[setr]

Given that Torvalds apparently went from design to implementation in 3 days, and 2 months later had it officially managing the kernel, I wouldn’t say it was particularly high-hanging.

[danesparza]

Pretty sure Git was a side project so that Linus could manage Linux source code like he wanted.