Not to forget daemontools.
I was surprised and looked him up on wikipedia -- he did indeed write daemontools.
Not to be confused with Daemon Tools :)
D. J. Bernstein
41–50 of 121 posts
Re: D. J. Bernstein
#42I 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? We…
If code I write is hard to deploy to your system, I don't think my code can be to blame. Rather, it's the fault of the system/language in which we are working.
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Re: D. J. Bernstein
#43I was with Aaron until > What other field combines all these arts? Language, math, art, design, function. Programming is clearly in a class of its own. And, when it comes to programmers, who even competes with djb? Who else has worked to realize these amazing possibilities? Who else even knows they are there? Is this satire?
Yeah, only slightly obnoxious. Nothing worse than somebody so relatively new to a field that they still think it objectively is better/cooler/more fulfilling than every other field.
Re: D. J. Bernstein
#44Bill Gates
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Re: D. J. Bernstein
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really does seem a bit pointless. Why not just say "djb writes great, beautiful code - some of the best I have ever seen" and leave it at that?
I agree, but aaronsw must come at an issue as a raging partisan. I know that in economics, philosophy, politics, and apparently best programmer ever!!!, he always comes at the issue with a deeply contentious point of view from an entrenched idealogical camp. It's kind of a shame because of the the advantages of being young is being able to approach a field without having to take sides. Meaningful dialog and inquiry v…
the advantages of being young is being able to approach a field without having to take sides.
You must be describing your youth, not mine! My experience with youth is that it was the period of my life in which the whites were blindingly white, the blacks impossibly back, and there were no colours or shades of grey to distract us from our belief that we knew exactly what was right and what was wrong.
And thank goodness, because a belief in right and wrong can propel you to change the world while you have the energy to carry it through :-)
Re: D. J. Bernstein
#46I 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? We…
> I've done it many times before manually and it takes around ten hours to do it. This is exactly why I've been using Postfix (or, preferably, get Google or someone else to handle it for me). Easy to install is a feature, and a pretty close cousin of the "shipping" feature. DJBs software is interesting mostly from an academic perspective. In the real world, it's hard to justify using something else, when apt-get gets…
I haven't used qmail, but I use djbdns. The complete installation, possibly including a few patches, is less work than figuring out how to set up BIND's configuration. It's available in Debian from apt-get.
It's good that it's so easy to figure out how to use, because I touch it less than once a year, so I've completely forgotten about it. That's great software.
Re: D. J. Bernstein
#47I much preferred the old title. Can a moderator put it back?
Re: D. J. Bernstein
#48I have a feeling that a large portion of the best programmers work in absolute obscurity.
I worked for a long time with guys that wrote embedded software. Absolutely brilliant guys that never get their due because no one knows how they were.
Re: D. J. Bernstein
#49(read this message with a background of "arguing about the best programmer is anyway silly") djb is in no way the best programmer of the world, but he is a very smart programmer, and probably an even better mathematician. And now, my arguments about why he is not the best programmer. 1) djb software is not the most elegant software around at all. Actually trying to write high performance and bug free software his sty…
"You can't be the best without being influential in the field."
I think an appropriate analogy is judging an architect on the hammers he has improved instead of the buildings he has designed.
Re: D. J. Bernstein
#50(read this message with a background of "arguing about the best programmer is anyway silly") djb is in no way the best programmer of the world, but he is a very smart programmer, and probably an even better mathematician. And now, my arguments about why he is not the best programmer. 1) djb software is not the most elegant software around at all. Actually trying to write high performance and bug free software his sty…
aguing about the best programmer is a smart move when seen as an exercise to find out what it is that makes a programmer good.