321–330 of 488 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before AI Slop most code quality that ran in production was shit, that's the GP's point. Anyone who thinks otherwise simply did not have to come in contact with a wide variety of code in their job.
Yet these same developers, these slop machines, are willing to die for "craftsmanship" and "code quality" when they are threatened by statistics. I don't see how you addressed my point.
“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 wor…
I’m no Einstein. XD
I wasn’t trying to minimize Bellard’s contributions! I’m in awe of them, and very grateful. If anything I was just noticing that Fabrice is a fantastic example of how much contribution those geniuses could make if they had access to even the bare minimum of education and stability.
For example, if they weren’t growing up in the kilns of India, where they don't actually have real opportunity to participate in “whatever the exams are called in India”:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No he never hid his identity, if you looked him up, you found his picture. Satoshi shouldn't be compared, I don't hold bitcoins nor am I interested, but the name is a lore. It was stamped on the original document. Fabrice Bellard is a real person shipping code; not an internet anonymous identity.
Parent knows. He makes an analogy, not an absolute equivalence.
Perhaps it was trying to stretch it to “unknown figure”, saying this programmer is mysterious, even though it was not by choice but circumstance: fame has eluded him. (Not implying it’s desired).
But on that reading, I would still say the metaphor fails: it’s not effective at conveying this meaning and reads more like an unnecessary Satoshi name drop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wor…
You're thinking of the legendary IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) JEE (Joint Entrance Exam). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Entrance_Examination
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.
Taking something that’s traditionally been hard and making it dramatically easier, better, and faster unlocks pent-up downstream use-cases.
I’m sure it’s some degree of both selection and execution, but so many industries have been unlocked simply because somebody showed up and figured out how to make a previously difficult thing easy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wor…
> where's your revolutionary free code that you gave to the world? I’m no Einstein. XD I wasn’t trying to minimize Bellard’s contributions! I’m in awe of them, and very grateful. If anything I was just noticing that Fabrice is a fantastic example of how much contribution those geniuses could make if they had access to even the bare minimum of education and stability. For example, if they weren’t growing up in the kil…
A schlub like me probably wouldn't, and I recognize the advantages I've had, but your quote was about Einsteins.
Ritchie, Knuth, Notch, Carmack, Dean etc… these are like the Mount Rushmore of writing code and I think that era is over.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "DX tarpits" Google shows no results for this term so i'm guessing its your own short hand for something hard?
Potentially a play on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit (DX is developer experience, tarpit is used idiomatically to mean “slow/difficult thing”)
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Although in this case it's more like using the paint in the tin to paint the tin itself. It's useless and completely missing the point of why the paint exists in the first place. You do you, I'm sorry if I come across rude and stupid, but I am both things. But "code is the product" is what IMO caused the downfall of this entire profession. No wonder everyone is trying to get rid of us. I wouldn't want a plumber that'…
I have worked at a never-ending list of places where people shipped the first thing that worked, built spaghetti around it, something else got built on top, and the original thing is now critical infrastructure that takes 10x longer to fix bugs or add needed features to than it would have if we’d taken 1.5x longer to ship it in the first place. I have worked at a never-ending list of places where developers beg for time to be set aside to deal with the worst parts that sap their time, energy, or will to continue working at the job. I have worked at a never-ending list of places that eventually sets aside a few days to tackle these tasks, when the engineers estimate two or three weeks. I have worked at a never-ending list of places that then uses the failure of these momentary diversions as evidence that their engineers don’t know what they’re talking about and should shut up and ship more features.
I sure wish I knew what masterpiece factories you must have spent your career working at.