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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

#61

Post by ErroneousBosh »

Bigpet wrote: post #36
jdsnape wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew of Fabrice, and have admired him for many years…but who is DHH?

If you did "web stuff" in the early 2000s (like 2005-2010). You'd probably know who he is. He did Ruby on Rails, a backend web framework. But that was also very Start-up and America focussed. So if you did web dev in some other country and didn't have colleagues who were into that culture you still might've missed the name.

There was a big RoR scene in Glasgow in the mid-2000s, but there were a few of us that were resolutely Django.

I stand by that decision, for various reasons.

Not least being that "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" gave me the ick.

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

#62

Post by pantulis »

swiftcoder wrote: post #13

> A French engineer who lives quietly in Paris has spent 30 years writing software that the entire internet now runs on without knowing his name. ... do tech people really not know who Fabrice Bellard is? He's kind of a household name in a lot of programming circles

He's a lifelong familiar name since the LZEXE days.

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

#63

Post by dgellow »

_zoltan_ wrote: post #22
swiftcoder wrote: post #13

> A French engineer who lives quietly in Paris has spent 30 years writing software that the entire internet now runs on without knowing his name. ... do tech people really not know who Fabrice Bellard is? He's kind of a household name in a lot of programming circles

no, most people wouldn't know. you're in an echo chamber if you think he is well known.

Can we stop calling every niche an echo chamber?

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

#65

Post by EugeneOZ »

jdw64 wrote: post #60

How on earth were those people able to create such amazing things? Will I ever be able to create something that brilliant someday? What should I even make? I have so many more tools than they did, even LLMs. Where can I learn the ideas and skills they had?

Start fixing the unfixable and doing the undoable things ;)

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

#66

Post by audunw »

bitwize wrote: post #5
sph wrote: post #3

First time I see his picture, and it’s a bit like someone’s revealed the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto when it’s clear they are going out of their way to protect their privacy and stay out of the limelight. My impression is the guy had always better things to do than engage with the greater internet, like thinking real hard and solving difficult problems. Much respect to his work, but even more respect to his work eth…

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 spaghetti code that gets the job done is why he’s so fast and effective. It’s a trade off

https://www.unicorn-engine.org/docs/beyond_qemu.html

I think there’s actually a sharp contrast with John Carmack here. Fabrice might be smarter and faster but Carmack is perhaps a better software engineer. You can really see the development of his style from Doom and Quake source code, where Quake 3 source is like a beautiful gem of a code base.

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

#68

Post by jdw64 »

pandaforce wrote: post #47

Bellard hasn't been involved in FFmpeg for *over 20 years* at this point, and more like 23. His code was not great and reeked of sphagetti due to FFmpeg back then lacking any framework for code sharing between components and codecs. These days none of his code survives. Everything that became of FFmpeg is because of other developers. Yet he's treated as the one-and-only BDFL of FFmpeg, with any other developers build…

You could be right. I don't really know much about FFMpeg. But going from 0 to 1 and going from 1 to 100 are different. Usually, people remember the 0 to 1 step more. Symbolic capital tends to go to the first mover. It might feel unfair, but we always remember the first challenger. It might be spaghetti code, there might be countless contributions later, but that's usually how it goes

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

#70

Post by latexr »

hamburgererror wrote: post #35

> He just keeps shipping. > He just wrote code. > He was not done. > He kept going. > He is still shipping. That guy talks like a scrum master, this linkedin bullshit writing style is just so bad...

My “favourite” was “a project called JSLinux that engineers still cannot believe is real”. Such dumb hyperbole.
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