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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

#371

Post by mschuster91 »

ryandrake wrote: post #220
theshrike79 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are multiple people I'm fine with in software circles - Daniel being one of them, but then we have Notch and DHH who used to be cool, but some of their current hot takes are kinda oof. Specifically way too many authors whose books I've loved have turned out to be not very good human beings. David Eddings and Neil Gaiman are pretty good examples of this.

Rowling / Harry Potter comes to mind, too, and Heinlein. You need to be able to separate the artist from the art, the programmer from the program. It’s ok to appreciate a work even if you disagree with its creator’s morals or ethics.

> It’s ok to appreciate a work even if you disagree with its creator’s morals or ethics.

In the case of Harry Potter... the perception of the work tends to follow the perception of the author. There's a bunch of issues with the original books that's widely seen as problematic today - character names seen as racist [1], enough problematic gender stereotypes to warrant half a dozen of academic papers of various quality, and last but not least antisemitism that continues even into modern works such as the shofar in Hogwarts Legacy [2].

I won't deny it, I enjoyed both the books and the movies, but it's ... not something I'd just hand over to my kids one day without having a serious talk with them beforehand. Back when I was young nobody cared too much (although I do member that at least in Germany, the goblins-jews analogy was discussed a bit), but nowadays...

[1] https://7news.com.au/entertainment/harry-potter-fans-call-ou...

[2] https://theconversation.com/how-hogwarts-legacy-video-game-r...

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

#372

Post by Capricorn2481 »

slmjkdbtl wrote: post #169
throwaway2037 wrote: post #116

For those unaware, you can find Fabrice's website here: https://bellard.org/ It has a full list of his projects.

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

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

It's literally just a list of

tags. This is ridiculous. It's running a single sentence across the entire window.

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

#373

Post by CuriouslyC »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #343
CuriouslyC wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

It isn't, but if you're sharing something and you care about people seeing/using it, they're the most "democratic" places to do it. Twitter/YouTube can work well but they're rich get richer platforms.

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

#374

Post by pdpi »

_zoltan_ wrote: post #23
pdpi wrote: post #19

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.

DHH is even less known, don't kid yourself.

I'm not saying DHH is more widely known than Fabrice Bellard. I'm saying that it really depends on your audience. I can think of many colleagues over the years who would know who David is, but not Fabrice.

(Also, I specifically chose DHH as somebody who's highly unlikely to show up in the same discussion as Fabrice Bellard, not because I'm a fan of his. Judging from the replies, I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations!)

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

#375

Post by ecshafer »

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 am on a 27" 4k screen and that website is very readable to me. Should the text all be in a single column in the center taking 10% of the screen like 99% of blogs now?

Chronological or Alphabetical sorting would make more sense than importance.

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

#377

Post by willXare »

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.

[dead]

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

#378

Post by rafram »

ecshafer wrote: post #375
rafram wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 am on a 27" 4k screen and that website is very readable to me. Should the text all be in a single column in the center taking 10% of the screen like 99% of blogs now? Chronological or Alphabetical sorting would make more sense than importance.

Anything above ~1000px is considered difficult to read, yes. For example, the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines require that the site at least provides a mechanism to set the width to 80 characters, or about 1000px at a standard font size: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#visual-presentation

You can push it if you want to maximize horizontal space utilization - the site you're on right now, for example, caps reflowing text to about 1200px - but reading is easier when you have to scan over less horizontal distance, and there's literally no reason not to set some max-width.

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

#379

Post by zerobees »

andai wrote: post #249
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.

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…

The actual calculus is that you spent 30 minutes on something that should have taken 30 seconds, but then you're done with it. The "proper" solution is to spend months or years fixing the workflow for complete strangers for free, even though you personally will never get that time back. Yeah, it moves the world forward, but it's not always the best choice on a personal level.

Also keep in mind that most of such charitable work goes nowhere. There is a fair number of projects shaped like ffmpeg or QEMU that have never achieved the critical mass. I've written a number of small utilities that simply went unnoticed because they were never featured on HN or anywhere else. Writing FOSS is pretty similar to starting your own band. It helps if you're a good singer, but it's not enough.

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

#380

Post by JKCalhoun »

delichon wrote: post #310

I have wondered if I sequentially ask people who is the smartest living person they know, and ask that person next, would it lead me toward the same small group of geniuses. If I were doing that with the best living coder I might well start with Carmack. So next I'd have to go to Bellard, and hope that his answer isn't Carmack.

I can list a dozen or so co-workers from my time at Apple that I would choose in an instant.
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