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D. J. Bernstein

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Re: D. J. Bernstein

#111

Post by mpk »

chaosmachine wrote: post #17
mikegioia wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to agree with you on JQuery. It runs on multiple browsers too and performs exceptionally well. It's gotta be one of my all time favorite pieces of software.

It's hard to overstate how great jQuery is. I'm always surprised at how easy it makes things. I remember the bad old days, spending hours researching the different ways to reference dom objects, trying to find a method that worked in more than one browser. With jQuery, you really can just code it once, and it works everywhere.

No offense, but the same can be said of Dojo, Prototype, Mootools, etc.

They all are rock solid cross-browser JS toolkits.

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#112

Post by antirez »

vorador wrote: post #77
antirez wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#3: sure, in general terms. Not true in my opinion for the best programmer of the world. Naturally he is "the one" that can master programming so well that it must be able to drive even programming language designers into more expressive / productive languages. djb can never be the one as in his code is very rare to find high level abstractions. as for #4 it's very admirable to write real world software, but the best…

Writing a text editor is a relatively easy task and it's more a matter of user interface than of implementation. Besides, I don't see why writing a mailer daemon is less important than, say, a text editor.

To write a text editor today is very different that inventing the first VIsual editor that is a major step forward, or Emacs that was a similar impressive step forward at the time.

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#113

Post by jrockway »

astine wrote: post #105
jrockway wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

qmail does not target your system.

QMail doesn't target Linux? Oh, wait, you mean it doesn't target me and others who doen't want to invest the effort in installing it. That's fine, I use Postfix and it works well enough for my needs.

I don't think postfix or exim4 even existed when qmail was written. Your alternative was sendmail, which was ... not easy to set up.

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#114

Post by vorador »

antirez wrote: post #112
vorador wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing a text editor is a relatively easy task and it's more a matter of user interface than of implementation. Besides, I don't see why writing a mailer daemon is less important than, say, a text editor.

To write a text editor today is very different that inventing the first VIsual editor that is a major step forward, or Emacs that was a similar impressive step forward at the time.

What do you mean by that ?

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#115

Post by astine »

jrockway wrote: post #113
astine wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QMail doesn't target Linux? Oh, wait, you mean it doesn't target me and others who doen't want to invest the effort in installing it. That's fine, I use Postfix and it works well enough for my needs.

I don't think postfix or exim4 even existed when qmail was written. Your alternative was sendmail, which was ... not easy to set up.

So what? Comparative programs have the same issue therefore it is not an issue? I'm not disputing that QMail is an improvement over Sendmail; in fact, I'm not disputing QMail at all. I've never deployed it, nor do I plan to do so.

I'm merely expressing my belief that in code that is meant to be used in production, facilitation of deployment is part of the problem scope. This is especially so when proper deployment is critical (as is the case with a mail server for example.) If QMail make deployment more difficult than it could be, then that is a problem with QMail. It might be the result of a worthwhile trade off. It might be better than it's competitors. But it's still a problem.

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#116

Post by nailer »

tzury wrote: post #9

Linus, RMS, Guido, and others. I can think of so many other names. You know what, even John Resig's jQuery software is served by millions of servers, running in billions of web pages every day. This all "THE BEST" thing, is somehow pointless IMO.

Only two others would equal DJB in terms of having more than one major well known app (a mail server and a DNS server). In my experience, I wouldn't say djbdns is particularly widely deployed...

Linus Torvalds

* The Linux Kernel

* git

Fabrice Bellard

* FFMpeg (if you've done anything with video in the last 10 years, you've used this)

* QEmu (basis for QEmu emulator and userspace portion of KVM VM). Ubuntu's open EC2-API compatible elastic cloud app uses this, as does Red Hat Advanced Platform.

If there are any others, let me know. Mongrel's pretty popular, if Lamson does the same maybe we could add Zed.

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#117

Post by nailer »

wallflower wrote: post #8

Bill Joy "As a UC Berkeley graduate student, Joy worked for Fabry's Computer Systems Research Group CSRG in managing the BSD support and rollout where many claim he was largely responsible for managing the authorship of BSD UNIX, from which sprang many modern forms of UNIX, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Apple Inc. has based much of the Mac OS X kernel and OS Services on the BSD technology. Some of his most…

I should add NetApp's internal OS is also BSD based - ironic since NetApp and Sun have been at each other's throats for years.

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#118

Post by nailer »

tptacek wrote: post #66
andreyf wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having so clear a vision of how your architecture should behave that you human-compile it into idiosyncratic code that looks generated seems to be a very good definition of beautiful code, no? Maybe he hasn't had time to write a book about the "code patterns" which he's using, but that's hardly something to hold a grudge about.

Especially if you're a security person, I think it's uncontroversial to say that the design is beautiful. It's not only an elegant design, but it is the first major piece of systems code to take that design approach. To put it differently: most of major systems programs that have been proven secure in the last 10 years owe their design to qmail. But that has nothing to do with the code, which is not only epsilon from…

qmail has a good design, but most of this is implementation of an existing well known concept, Principle of Least Privilege. Similar apps like Postfix owe more to whoever came up with that theory than they do to DJB IMHO.

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#119

Post by nailer »

shawnps wrote: post #89
shawnps wrote: post #78

Could someone clarify this for me, please? On this page: http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/intro-dns.html under the "Multiple Servers" section, he says "To protect against computer failure, there are actually several root servers, several .to servers, and two yp.to servers." I don't understand, is he saying there are only two DNS servers in the world that you can contact to resolve yp.to?

Is there a way to find out for any given domain how many actual servers hand out responses to other DNS servers to hold in their caches?

dnstracer can show you that and much more. A great tool, shame nobody's heard of it.
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