Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Tech people" aren't one single homogeneous mass. His name is unlikely to show up in the same conversation as, say, DHH.
I knew of Fabrice, and have admired him for many years…but who is DHH?
I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
201–210 of 488 posts
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Tech people" aren't one single homogeneous mass. His name is unlikely to show up in the same conversation as, say, DHH.
What is a DHH? A person?
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#203Little known Fabrice Bellard project. He worked with the ATSC to test the ATSC 3.0 PHY layer when he was consulting at DekTec.
Rather than potentially 1000 HN readers each spending 15 minutes on Google trying to work out what you are talking about, may I suggest that you expand that with a few plain English sentences that tell us what that means? I have no idea what "ATSC" means, and I've been in tech for nearly 40 years now so I have a fairly good handle on this stuff.
Advanced Television Systems Committee. It's the US standards organization for terrestrial digital television. ATSC 3.0 is a new standard that's very similar to DVB-T2 (used in the UK for HDTV) at the PHY layer.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#204It's interesting to me that most of Bellard's work is basically turning specs into C. His most important projects are ffmpeg (codec specs), qEmu (ISA specs), QuickJS (the EcmaScript spec), tinyC (the C spec), and his telecom company (LTE specs). I guess the pi calculations and neural network stuff are exceptions. Just to be clear, this doesn't make his work any less impressive. Highly performant codec and emulator im…
If you actually work with ffmpeg, it's rather quite impressive how pluggable the architecture is. The codecs have huge amount of quirks and disagreements about basics (what is a "frame" in audio, subtitle, and video worlds?) and even their environment (passing frames around software and hardware coders is way different).
That fact that you can (almost) freely mix and match processing between such different worlds is quite an achievement and libav (IMO) is decently well designed to allow that.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#205How on earth were those people able to create such amazing things? Will I ever be able to create something that brilliant someday? What should I even make? I have so many more tools than they did, even LLMs. Where can I learn the ideas and skills they had?
Find an itch, then scratch it. If many people have the same itch and can use your solution, you win. Simple as that.
The converse: Most itches will either be idiosyncratic, and not get you much attention, or lots of people will be scratching them and it's hard to come out "on top".
I scratch lots of itches, but I also know that most of them are very, very fringe. So going into scratching itches expecting fame is not going to go well for most. But scratching itches is satisfying, so for my part at least I don't care.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But the code quality is speed No it’s not. Code quality is just code quality. It's a subjective measure. eg how do you define one thing is of greater "quality" than another? Is it CPU ops? Memory footprint? Code readability? And how do you measure readability? By who? What I find readable someone else might not, and visa versa. If you’re making choices to improve development throughput then that’s fine. But so ofte…
Thanks for saying this! I completely agree with everything you said! There’s far, far too many people who confuse code quality for speed of development and start treating code quality as the product for customer base in the hundreds and active customers in the dozens and for most features to be basically unused. The reality is that tech debt as a concept these days is hardly real: to be in debt means previous decisio…
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Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But the code quality is speed No it’s not. Code quality is just code quality. It's a subjective measure. eg how do you define one thing is of greater "quality" than another? Is it CPU ops? Memory footprint? Code readability? And how do you measure readability? By who? What I find readable someone else might not, and visa versa. If you’re making choices to improve development throughput then that’s fine. But so ofte…
Thanks for saying this! I completely agree with everything you said! There’s far, far too many people who confuse code quality for speed of development and start treating code quality as the product for customer base in the hundreds and active customers in the dozens and for most features to be basically unused. The reality is that tech debt as a concept these days is hardly real: to be in debt means previous decisio…
Im talking about the speed of mental model building, understanding concepts, relations and organizational concepts.
Good codebases sort of read themselves. You can guess where things are, how they are sorted and how they work, by understanding and relying on the authors ideas.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#208Bellard is a genius. Carmack's modesty about his own genius is impressive too.
I wouldn’t call comparing yourself to Fabrice Ballard and not just saying he’s a better programmer modest.
Yeah he phrases it odd. Like with the "almost certainly" and "overall" qualifiers. Not "he is a better programmer than I would dream to be..."
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#209It's interesting to me that most of Bellard's work is basically turning specs into C. His most important projects are ffmpeg (codec specs), qEmu (ISA specs), QuickJS (the EcmaScript spec), tinyC (the C spec), and his telecom company (LTE specs). I guess the pi calculations and neural network stuff are exceptions. Just to be clear, this doesn't make his work any less impressive. Highly performant codec and emulator im…
It's worth noting that most communications specifications that involve an encoder/decoder pair communicating over a channel only specify the encoder. Standards purposely leave the decoder open to allow systems to progress as technology develops and to allow competition between implementations. This also makes a standard simpler, as a decoder is usually more complex than an encoder since it has to deal with noise and other effects introduced by the channel. Consequently, implementing a competitive standards compliant decoder involves R&D and is not a case of following a predefined path.
I've always seen Bellard as an engineer who programs rather than a pure programmer.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#210It's interesting to me that most of Bellard's work is basically turning specs into C. His most important projects are ffmpeg (codec specs), qEmu (ISA specs), QuickJS (the EcmaScript spec), tinyC (the C spec), and his telecom company (LTE specs). I guess the pi calculations and neural network stuff are exceptions. Just to be clear, this doesn't make his work any less impressive. Highly performant codec and emulator im…
That's actually how I was trained. The spec and the implementation (and the testing) were separate areas; sometimes, done by different people.
These days, I tend to mix them all together, and I think I get good results.
I strongly suspect that a lot of folks, these days, only do the middle one.