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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

#261

Post by hnlmorg »

ryandrake wrote: post #211
hnlmorg wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is one of the reasons I got away from writing commercial software and now only write code as a hobby. To me, the code itself is the product. I want the code to look like a beautiful painting—the fact that it does something is secondary. I’ll sit there for hours working on things like const correctness, and making sure each class has the bare minimum amount of state/instance variables, making sure function argume…

Yeah, a lot of businesses definitely do push things too far the other way and advocate releasing _anything_ regardless of how well it works.

I'm strongly against the "move fast and break things" mentality. But there is a happy middle ground between architecting works of art, and shipping urinals with faulty plumbing.

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

#262

Post by ErroneousBosh »

DonHopkins wrote: post #135
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh DHH is well known. We all know about DHH.

Just that he's a douchebag, not what the letters stand for.

I hope your middle name doesn't start with H ;-)

We know it's not you.

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

#266

Post by harrouet »

femto wrote: post #209
miki123211 wrote: post #185

It's interesting to me that most of Bellard's work is basically turning specs into C. His most important projects are ffmpeg (codec specs), qEmu (ISA specs), QuickJS (the EcmaScript spec), tinyC (the C spec), and his telecom company (LTE specs). I guess the pi calculations and neural network stuff are exceptions. Just to be clear, this doesn't make his work any less impressive. Highly performant codec and emulator im…

It's worth noting that most communications specifications that involve an encoder/decoder pair communicating over a channel only specify the encoder. Standards purposely leave the decoder open to allow systems to progress as technology develops and to allow competition between implementations. This also makes a standard simpler, as a decoder is usually more complex than an encoder since it has to deal with noise and…

It is exactly the opposite for MPEG, which only specifies the decoder (i.e. how frames should be decoded).

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

#267

Post by nixon_why69 »

nerdsniper wrote: post #264

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

Horrible take given Bellard's lack of general recognition and also the situation in developed-nation-2026. There are 2 billion people not dying in cotton fields or sweatshops, you're not, where's your revolutionary free code that you gave to the world?

Over half the planet gets a chance to prove they're smart in this day and age, between gaokao in China and whatever the exams are called in India, plus the western world and the rich portions of poor countries.

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

#268

Post by justin66 »

j4k3 wrote: post #256

You remember when Micro Center had those portraits of computer greats hanging around the ceiling of their stores? I never noticed it until I looked up one day and saw Denis Ritchie, Vint Cerf, Grace Hopper, etc. The local Micro Center was re-done and I can't remember seeing the portraits, but this guy could be a candidate for a Micro Center banner.

I thought it was rather sad when they removed those. That removal was fairly recent, too. I'm sure plenty of people were saying "who is Dan Bricklin?" but it added some needed character to the store.

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

#269

Post by groceries8192 »

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…

> The code isn’t beautiful and elegant

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What you find beautiful, I would find grotesque, and vice versa. What you think of as well-organized, I think of as spaghetti.

I think it's great that we can have such a diversity of viewpoints on beauty, but I wouldn't advise making universal proclamations on beauty standards.

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

#270

Post by naasking »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #197
afavour wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the invisible engine of what makes up the majority of today’s internet. I don’t think that’s hyperbole. Tomorrows internet might not be the same.

Ffmpeg has nothing to do with the internet other than being distributed on it

Most bytes traversing the internet is video these days. Arguably, ffmpeg has processed most of that video.
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