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I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

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Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#341

Post by swiftcoder »

andai wrote: post #246

Reading the list of Bellard's contributions, what strikes me is not the raw ability (although certainly there is that too!) but "damn, he knows how to pick 'em!" He keeps picking stuff to work on that ends up being insanely useful to a massive number of people. That seems somehow even more remarkable than the technical ability. Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life.

> Deciding what to work on might be the most important question in life.

The flip side of this, is if you have the ability, you can just pick the hardest problem in your field, go solve it... rinse and repeat.

Everyone can find out what the hardest problems in their field are, it's not a secret, just a question of if you have the ability/gumption/willingness to go spend years of your life attacking a problem like that

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#342

Post by Georgelemental »

andrehacker wrote: post #333
Georgelemental wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, while he is the original author of both those programs, both are now developed by other people and have been for many years.

Isn't that how it is supposed to work ? Stroke of genius (over and over again) to get something working given constraints of the day followed by hundreds of engineers who will improve on the foundations, basically like Wozniak ?

Yes, also to be clear, I am not diminishing Bellard's achievement

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#343

Post by bigfishrunning »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #284
nasretdinov wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I don't believe anyone in their right mind thinks that ffmpeg is still maintained and developed by a single person, and definitely not by Fabrice 2. Spaghetti code or not matters very little, especially in the beginning, before you even know or understand the scope of the project and what it can become in the future. You can indeed refactor code when you understand the requirements better, and it's great that it's…

> 2. Spaghetti code or not matters very little, especially in the beginning, before you even know or understand the scope of the project and what it can become in the future. Demonstrably false. Here and on Reddit, everyone will dogpile on a project to call it slop and flag it if they see code smells they don't like. Unless it was written by someone they already know and like from twitter devgooning, in which case it…

it's possible that "popular on HN and Reddit" is not a universal goal for writing code...

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#344

Post by bigfishrunning »

DiskoHexyl wrote: post #224
bcjdjsndon wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like without video, is there still internet..... Absolutely yes. It's a tad hyperbolic I agree

For us- sure. For most of the internet users- very likely no. Social media and video streaming IS the internet for the majority

it sounds like paradise, we should start working toward this immediately

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#345

Post by atonse »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #255
andai wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess would be the hueristic is "I want to do simple thing, why is it so hard?" (Modern computing has an overabundance of "DX tarpits".) Which is funny because, everyone has that experience, right? But then approximately nobody proceeds to do something about it. (Including most people who have the skills to make a difference!) Like, that's surprisingly mundane, and surprisingly actionable. --- If we distil it into…

I think you're underestimating the skill required to do it that well. Add 1 wrong feature and suddenly your simple project working around a DX tarpits is a new tarpit. A lot of devs like building features.

To be fair, almost zero people praise the dx for ffmpeg. but the utility and value is so massively high, that it overcomes the famously complex dx of ffmpeg. I'm not even insulting ffmpeg, if it does a million things, then there are going to be a million knobs.

I think of git as the same. The git cli is not intuitive at all (unless that lightbulb goes off) but the utility is so good, that people just kind of suck it up and use it.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#346

Post by ryan_n »

rafram wrote: post #297
slmjkdbtl wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great programmers often also have great personal website design, everything is so clear and not one bit of redundance.

It's really not a great design. It's just nerdy in a HN way. A great website would list projects in approximate order of importance/notability, would use the tiniest bit of CSS to make the text readable on wide screens, and would have images for projects with a visual component. The only reason his site is appealing is because you already know who he is.

I agree it's not the most pleasant site to visit. I understand peoples desire to move the web back towards simplicity/html only with no js. But a little bit of css does not hurt and would make simple sites like this a lot more enjoyable to look at. Just my opinion..

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#347

Post by overfeed »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #103
hnlmorg wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think developers sometimes get too obsessed with code quality thinking that smarter code makes them a better developer. In fact I’ve seen developers fall into the trap of mistaking their code as the product and thus spend so much time beautifying it that that fail to ever release anything. Then you have the other end of the spectrum where people are too focused on hacking stuff together that the end result is unmai…

But the code quality is speed. And reach. You can not advance, unless you can read the code, you can understand the model, you can not scale beyond a certain point. The beauty of the architecture is the ability to build a spaceship compared to a train of kerosene tankers. Physically similar, but in capability radical different. I find this very scary. Somebody unable to perceive capabilities and tech-debt. If you can…

> But the code quality is speed. And reach. You can not advance, unless you can read the code, you can understand the model, you can not scale beyond a certain point

Other people can do the important work of investing time to understand the model and simplify the code architecture, as proven many times over by actively maintained projects pioneered by Fabrice.

To kickstart a project, you have to show people that something they assumed impossible or hard to achieve is actually possible by dropping it in front of them.

> Its a great interview topic to filter this kind of candidate out of companies.

Fabrice Bellard ships. It makes sense to filter him out if you're a bank or an org with well-established products that prefers stability over velocity. If you're a start-up or have lots of greenfield projects requiring fast experimentation loops: you need folk who can ship quickly. Most organizations have a mix of projects and need a healthy mix of engineers, or ones who can flip modes relevant to the project.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#348

Post by dkarl »

hnlmorg wrote: post #143
21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the code quality is speed. And reach. You can not advance, unless you can read the code, you can understand the model, you can not scale beyond a certain point. The beauty of the architecture is the ability to build a spaceship compared to a train of kerosene tankers. Physically similar, but in capability radical different. I find this very scary. Somebody unable to perceive capabilities and tech-debt. If you can…

> 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…

> The problem with "tech debt" is it can mean anything from "this is ugly code that takes 5 minutes longer to read but it works well" to "this in a insecure/unstable pile of horse manure and customers will start to notice". > > The latter is where time should be spent. The former is a vanity project that doesn't bring the business any value.

You may have worked with people whose meaning of "code quality" encompassed things that you found inconsequential and a waste of effort. They may have even told you that if you didn't care about those things, then you didn't care about code quality. But that's not true. It only meant you disagreed with them about what code quality is and how to recognize it.

You draw a distinction between aspects of code that tend to lead to better outcomes and aspects of code that don't matter. You say you know what tech debt looks like. When you look at a codebase, you have opinions on where time should be spent to improve it. "Code quality" is shorthand for the heuristics underlying those opinions.

Instead of accepting that other, possibly dumber people get to define what code quality is, own your own definition of it and use it when you communicate with other people.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#349

Post by gopher_space »

taeric wrote: post #300
abustamam wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an extension to your last point, here in the US people love complaining about politics (on both sides) but very few people (including me!) take the time to come up with solutions and go to town halls, or write to senators apart from the automated message that makes you feel like you did a thing, or even run for office. Of course, all of those are hard! And I think that speaks to the modern tarpits. No one set out…

A big hidden in plain site facet of this, is few are willing to put forth the work within the existing system. That is, going to town halls, writing senators, and running for office are all standard parts of the system people are complaining about. And they are offering the complaints, largely, as stand in complaints for whole hosts of problems that they actually think are there. So, agreed, few are willing to ignore…

I don’t know, it wasn’t until the pandemic and a layoff that I had time to actually sit and think.

There’s a reason that most of the voters (and protesters in my area) are retired, and it isn’t apathy. I don’t have time to educate myself on these topics in any real depth.

And I need to educate myself because the push information is all bullshit. Digging into policing in Seattle, the official and public conversation was all culture war while the actual problems looked like simple incompetence from a system analysis perspective.

I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with this kind of fumbling on every topic, and I’m realizing that my parents didn’t live in a low-trust society like I do.

Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer

#350

Post by wang_li »

gaigalas wrote: post #38
sph wrote: post #3

First time I see his picture, and it’s a bit like someone’s revealed the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto when it’s clear they are going out of their way to protect their privacy and stay out of the limelight. My impression is the guy had always better things to do than engage with the greater internet, like thinking real hard and solving difficult problems. Much respect to his work, but even more respect to his work eth…

Honestly, two mythologized figures (Carmack and Bellard). They're good (like, quite good), but as soon as their names come up people start talking about some weird expectation of what they are supposed to think rather than the actual things they did. Somehow, that mythologizing diminishes their accomplishments.

I am of an age with Carmack and wanted to be a game developer when i was young. I very much elevated him very high. In terms of computer graphics he is very informed and talented. But I have watched him do interviews that largely focused on other areas and I find him to be pretty average or even below average. His thoughts on BJJ and AI are quite immature and don't express any special insight.
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