D. J. Bernstein

#1

Post by access_denied » Mon, Oct 19, 2009, 1:47 PM UTC

D. J. Bernstein
aaronsw.com

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#2

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Oct 19, 2009, 1:53 PM UTC

I think he would have my vote, but there are some other 'great' programmers out there.

how about this for minimalism: http://cr.yp.to/

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#3

Post by owinebarger » Mon, Oct 19, 2009, 2:23 PM UTC

Despite the purple prose, I generally agree with Aaron's sentiments about great programming ("the best", I can't say, but definitely "great"). He is, however, also very rude, at least in his online persona. Having "a forceful, uncompromising vision" is an orthogonal issue to how you choose to communicate.

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#4

Post by niels » Mon, Oct 19, 2009, 2:25 PM UTC

Not to forget daemontools.

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#5

Post by whirlycott1 » Mon, Oct 19, 2009, 2:25 PM UTC

I have dealt with qmail for ten years. It is a complete joy once you have it up and running. You literally can stop thinking about it because it always works. However, getting it up and running requires adding in antispam, antivirus, virtual mailboxes, some additional protective and administrative patches, some extra stuff for SMTP-AUTH, SSL/TLS, reporting, and perhaps a few more patches for fun.

Patches, you say? Well, I'm glad you really like source code, because that's exactly what you'll be dealing with to get all of this up and running. I've done it many times before manually and it takes around ten hours to do it.

While Aaron's point is that djb's code, vision and discipline are possibly unmatched (I concur on all counts), the software (principally qmail) is antiquated in the sense that nobody needs just that one part in order to run a semi-modern email system.

So, as you start downloading the .tgz for qmail and begin studying it like good campers, remember that this wonderful code is, by itself, not up to the job that it purports to serve.

-- Lots of love,

Someone who currently runs two qmail systems and will never go to the trouble of setting one up again

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#6

Post by dustingetz » Mon, Oct 19, 2009, 2:31 PM UTC

niels wrote: post #4

Not to forget daemontools.

I was surprised and looked him up on wikipedia -- he did indeed write daemontools.

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#7

Post by idlewords » Mon, Oct 19, 2009, 2:34 PM UTC

owinebarger wrote: post #3

Despite the purple prose, I generally agree with Aaron's sentiments about great programming ("the best", I can't say, but definitely "great"). He is, however, also very rude, at least in his online persona. Having "a forceful, uncompromising vision" is an orthogonal issue to how you choose to communicate.

I can't read anything Aaron writes without my mind flying back to his seminal essay on the unanticipated softness of the human breast:

http://them.ws/post/1736/testing_something

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#8

Post by wallflower » Mon, Oct 19, 2009, 2:35 PM UTC

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 notable contributions were the vi editor, NFS, and csh. Joy's prowess as a computer programmer is legendary, with an oft-told anecdote that he wrote the vi editor in a weekend. Joy denies this assertion.[2]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#9

Post by tzury » Mon, Oct 19, 2009, 2:59 PM UTC

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.

Re: D. J. Bernstein

#10

Post by pilif » Mon, Oct 19, 2009, 3:01 PM UTC

This is slightly off-topic as it's not about djb, but about qmail. Still:

I have some experience with qmail. While I agree that it's generally very nice and certainly incredibly bug free, that quality comes at a price: Lack of features.

The moment you start adding stuff: Server-side filtering (like sieve), LMTP, virus checking, spam filtering, virtual users - all that stuff you need to run a modern mail server - you will have to patch qmail.

And by manually patching your installation, you are picking up responsibility: Now that you are not running stock qmail, but something you patched and installed yourself, you will no longer be able to rely on your distribution for security fixes and you'll have to keep updated and repatch yourself.

And while qmail is beautiful and bugfree, the same can not always be said for the additional patches, so you WILL be patching.

If you get all the patches for the functionality you need to actually play together that is.

If qmail solves your issue and you are prepared for this, then go with qmail. If you need a ton of functionality built-into your mailserver, probably go Exim and if you need good compromise between featureset, architecture and security, then you'll probably take postfix.