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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

#151

Post by gaigalas »

noisy_boy wrote: post #146
gaigalas wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no such thing as "human nature", that's just a way to justify something that can't be easily explained. I have nothing against it. The fact that I explained a mechanism (mythologizing diminishes one's real work) offends people who like to do it, but that's outside of my control. It's not meant to offend or deny their right to do it. It is just what it is and I'm naming it. I understand it's uncomfortable, and…

I don't even know what are you arguing against. > I love mythology by the way, stories, etc. Fascinating stuff. Most people do. Given that it is quite prevalent across cultures and given that we are a product of our genetics and upbringing, one might even say, in our nature.

I think it's the wrong lens for observing this conversation. You're looking for something that I might be attacking. I'm not doing what you think I am, that's why you can't pinpoint it.

It's a simple observation: mythologizing might diminish one's work.

Even if we assume there's some "human nature", that claim stands unchallenged.

"But you can't fight this thing that all humans do" is your line, and it was never my point to fight it. I want to explain what it does, not change it (which is outside of my control).

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

#153

Post by newsclues »

cassianoleal wrote: post #141

> Today FFmpeg is the invisible engine of the internet. I get what the author is saying but I really dislike this hyperbole. The Internet will be absolutely fine if FFmpeg suddenly disappears. Companies that rely on it in the core of their product may not, but the Internet absolutely will, and the vast majority of websites and other Internet services will keep working just fine.

Without YouTube and porn, is there really an internet?

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

#154

Post by xyzzy123 »

audunw wrote: post #66
bitwize wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I say, Bellard is Mozart when most of us can't even hope to be Salieri.

Mozart doesn’t feel right. The code isn’t beautiful and elegant. It’s not built to last (at least for ffmpeg) or be some kind of masterpiece. He writes code to get a job done or tickle some intellectual curiosity. It’s not beautiful but that’s OK. I think Unicorn illustrates one of the issues with his style. It wouldn’t have needed to exist of the QEMU code was architected into neat components. But then writing spagh…

I wonder if what you're noticing in Fabrice's code is a lack of _abstraction_ beyond whats obviously needed to get the job done. It's not spaghetti IMHO, I think its what code looks like when you're smart enough to just hold most of the problem in your head. I am speculating a bit here, because I am not that smart.

If I had to describe it in aesthetic terms I would maybe say brutalism?

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

#156

Post by FartyMcFarter »

copperx wrote: post #4

"He is almost certainly a better overall programmer than I am." Hedging the claim with a lot of qualifiers. What's wrong with admitting someone is a better programmer? even giving someone else the benefit of the doubt?

Programmers are notoriously nitpicky, and avoid making absolute statements in most cases (wait, I'm doing it too!).

This is because we've been trained to be humble by the machines we work with. Computers expose a lot of our mistakes, and over time they remove any illusion that we can be quickly confident about things.

I would take the qualifiers in his post as an indication of his general disinclination towards making absolute statements, not as a lack of humility.

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

#157

Post by brunooliv »

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…

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 decisions or a previous implementation makes current work extremely hard or impossible, but, the truth is that the human factors such as knowing what to build, team collaboration and even speaking to customers matter far more and can get you “in debt” so so much faster than code alone. At least in your typical SaaS company.

If you ship code in a way that you let tech debt pile up to the point that customers notice it, you have an organisational problem, not code issues per se.

The fact that a lot of people don’t get this is really baffling to me.

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

#158

Post by a96 »

account42 wrote: post #117
a96 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro... https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-righ...

That validates his point - barely anyone outside the ruby community would even know about DHH if he didn't manage to trigger the eternally outraged.

Oh, yes. That was a straight-face answer to "who DHH is", not anything to contradict or argue anyone's point. I never heard of the initialism in any other context either.
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