Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Tech people" aren't one single homogeneous mass. His name is unlikely to show up in the same conversation as, say, DHH.
I knew of Fabrice, and have admired him for many years…but who is DHH?
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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
#82Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#83Bellard 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…
I just found this comment from 15y ago on the ffmpeg/libav drama: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/vvdxn/comment/c57zdk...
I don't know ffmpeg but this resonates with my experience with other open source projects.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#84Bellard 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…
> These days all he does is hold the copyright
You mean trademark. The copyright is held by the authors of the code (or their employer, etc.), since there is no copyright assignment requirement.
This is similar to how Linus Torvalds owns the "Linux" trademark (in some jurisdictions), but the copyright mostly belongs to other contributors.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#85Bellard 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…
The psyop about "only shipping clean code" has been a big drag on projects
On the real world, if it runs and solves their problem nobody gives a fucc. Period
Props on him.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#86remember when HN was interesting?
Pepperidge Farms remembers...
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#87How 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?
The smart path: Find good mentors (and return the favor); use LLMs not to do the work but to help you learn and exercise your brain: make them test you, using something aking to teacher/Socratic method, make mistakes and get the mentor/LLM to review in a way you figure out the answer.
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#88"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?
Depends on what we mean by programmer.
Fabrice is more clever and faster, I guess.
But John Carmack is in my mind a better software engineer. He writes elegant code that can be used and maintained for a long time. At least from Quake 2ish, but you can see signs of solid code architecture already in Doom.
Doom code will live almost as-is forever. The code Fabrice wrote for ffmpeg has been entirely replaced
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#89> 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
"Tech people" aren't one single homogeneous mass. His name is unlikely to show up in the same conversation as, say, DHH.
What is a DHH? A person?
Re: I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
#90How 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?
Find a problem and work on a solution for 20+ years.