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Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

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Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#291

Post by jeffreyrogers »

gutitout wrote: post #119
aerique wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd wonder what the original Coca Cola would taste like.

Cocaine

Modern Coca-Cola is still flavored with coca leaves. Coca-Cola still imports the leaves and they are processed by a pharmaceutical company to extract the cocaine.

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#293

Post by meheleventyone »

l30n4da5 wrote: post #109
meheleventyone wrote: post #58

Mojang was formed relatively early on in the development of Minecraft and had a small team (and outsourced dev for other platforms) for quite a lot of it's development and obviously now is a behemoth.

Minecraft was pretty damn polished before it ever released, though. He formed Mojang pretty early, but if I recall, there were no employees other than Notch for a long while. Talking about when it was in beta and the only way to play it was in the browser.

The Minecraft Alpha was released in June 2010 and Mojang was setup a few months later in September. A little more than a year after the first public release. There were four other people from the beginning with a few more people joining as development to release progressed over the next year. At least as I understand things.

Then between 2011 and 2014 when it was sold to MS there were a lot more employees, development and outsourcing which is arguably when it exploded.

Wasn’t the JS release done specifically for the tenth anniversary?

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#294

Post by joe__f »

tiborsaas wrote: post #49

General relativity, they haven't found a dent in it yet.

General relativity was not produced in isolation, there were a number of other big names in mathematics and physics at the time trying to find a relativistic theory of gravitation. Einstein will have been discussing with the other physicists and been familiar with their work.

See for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordstr%C3%B6m%27s_theory_of...

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#295

Post by tiborsaas »

joe__f wrote: post #294
tiborsaas wrote: post #49

General relativity, they haven't found a dent in it yet.

General relativity was not produced in isolation, there were a number of other big names in mathematics and physics at the time trying to find a relativistic theory of gravitation. Einstein will have been discussing with the other physicists and been familiar with their work. See for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordstr%C3%B6m%27s_theory_of...

In that sense, the vast majority of inventions aren't original or created in a vacuum, we all build on the top of giants.

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#296

Post by marttt »

The FreeDOS operating system [1], started in 1994 by Jim Hall. Several critical parts of the system (e.g. the kernel) were written by others, but he is still coordinating the project in 2022. They released version 1.3 just recently.

Charles Childers' work on the tiny Retro Forth language [2] is also worth pointing out. It was started by Tom Novelli, but according to interwebs, Childers took over in 2001. Really cool language if you like tiny VM-based systems and forth.

Another tiny one-man language is PicoLisp [3]. Created by Alexander Burger in around 1988, and he's still the maintainer. He has been using it in commercial application development ever since.

Today, I'm wishing a long and healthy life to Virgil Dupras' Collapse OS! [4]

EDIT:

Another project I really like is Willus.com's k2pdfopt [5], a small cross-platform tool that optimizes pdf files for mobile readers. Started in around 2011; judging by the website, very probably a single-person thing.

One more is, edbrowse, a "command line editor browser" with ed-like command language [6]. Originally written in 2002 by Karl Dahlke for blind users, but might be interesting to many others as well because of its scripting abilites.

Ah, and also mhwaveedit [7], Magnus Hjorth's wave editor, developed by him since around 2002. And Mark Tyler's mtpaint [8], which was apparently very much inspired by mhwaveedit.

A fascinating single-person made digital audio workstation is Non DAW by Jonathan Moore Liles [9], started in around 2006. I've used it a lot, great modular design, ran really well on an old Thinkpad T42.

Serenity OS [10] has also been in development for 3 years. Andreas Kling's amazing effort.

Possibly Dwarf Fortress [11] would also almost count as a two-man project, by Tarn and Zach Adams, going on since 2002.

Nils M. Holm's creations also deserve a mention for sure. Scheme 9 From Empty Space, Klong array language, several books, etc [12]. Really inspiring guy.

Not wishing to turn HN into Wikipedia, so I'll stop here. The dedication behind this kind of projects is amazing, really.

1: https://www.freedos.org/

2: http://retroforth.org/

3: https://picolisp.com/

4: http://collapseos.org/

5: https://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/

6: http://edbrowse.org/

7: https://github.com/magnush/mhwaveedit

8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtPaint

9: http://non.tuxfamily.org/

10: http://serenityos.org/

11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_Fortress

12: http://t3x.org/s9fes/

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#297

Post by closeparen »

dimitar wrote: post #193

The Clojure programming language was a single person effort in the first years and all of the design and implementation was done by Rich Hickey in the first version (2 years of work, not counting previous experience). He was burned out from the state of commercial programming around the time and funded a sabbatical with his pension savings to work on Clojure. He had at least 3 attempts to bridge Common Lisp and the J…

It’s also of course in the fundamental nature of Lisp that you can change the language by importing stuff rather than actually editing the core implementation.

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#298

Post by otoburb »

bduerst wrote: post #226
cornedor wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rollercoaster Tycoon/Transport Tycoon

Dwarf Fortress by Tarn Adams Also worth noting, Chris Sawyer wrote the original Roller Coaster Tycoon code directly in Assembly. It's probably one of the reasons the simulation game worked so well on earlier systems.

I thought DF was written by both Zach and Tarn Adams, and not just Tarn alone.[1]

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xypb5/the-dwarf-fortress-cr...

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#299

Post by mabbo »

toto444 wrote: post #161
nafey wrote: post #26

Surprised no one mentioned git. Made over the course of a single week by Linus Torvalds,

Does that mean that a less competent developper could write a more intuitive alternative in a few months ?

Intuition is really the problem with git. Most developers that use git daily don't actually have a deep understanding of the domain model powering it. They don't know why it's doing things, or why they need to do things in a certain way.

It's terribly unintuitive.

But it's also so powerful that nearly every use case you might have can be done with it.

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