The programming talent myth [LWN.net]

The programming talent myth

Posted Apr 29, 2015 13:09 UTC (Wed) by alan (subscriber, #4018)
In reply to: The programming talent myth by dskoll
Parent article: The programming talent myth

The PostgreSQL has multiple rock-star quality developers. They just don't have rock-star sized ego.

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The programming talent myth

Posted Apr 29, 2015 13:42 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (6 responses)

The PostgreSQL has multiple rock-star quality developers. They just don't have rock-star sized ego.

Hmm, ok, cool. I guess that strengthens my assertion that there are programmers who are much better than average.

The programming talent myth

Posted Apr 29, 2015 20:40 UTC (Wed) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (5 responses)

But the fact that you thought the postgres developers weren't whatever you feel is a rock-star developer, when they have developed a far more useful, stable, and long-lived product than Qemu and Tcl (and definitely better code than some of the early version of qemu - which I had to modify and work with at time. Not bad, but not beautiful ;) )..... doesn't help the credibility of your evaluations. You seem to be evaluating based on personality and some nebulous "vision" of what the code should be, not a useful finished product. I could be wrong, but the evidence currently points the other direction.

(yeah, Qemu is neat (and useful at times), and had some clever tricks for targeting, and an interesting and challenging project, but it's not nearly as polished as postgres).

The programming talent myth

Posted Apr 30, 2015 1:30 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (3 responses)

You seem to be evaluating based on personality and some nebulous "vision" of what the code should be, not a useful finished product.

Not at all. Tcl is an amazingly beautiful and well-written piece of software. Try comparing it's C internals with (bleh) Perl's or (yuuuckkk) PHP's.

As for Bellard, I wasn't specifically thinking only of QEMU, but some of his other amazing hacks like TCC, the JavaScript PC emulator and his record-setting (for the time) computation of Pi.

PostgreSQL does happen to be a more useful or at least more widely-used project than the others, but I think their quality is just as high.

The programming talent myth

Posted Apr 30, 2015 10:16 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

> his record-setting (for the time) computation of Pi.

…which was also an IOCCC submission.

The programming talent myth

Posted Apr 30, 2015 11:47 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, so what? You really have to be an excellent programmer to enter the IOCCC because you have to thoroughly understand the nuances of good software development so that you can outrageously do the exact opposite. Just like you have to be a really good writer to write a successful parody.

I think you'll find that the list of IOCCC winners contains a lot of excellent programmers.

The programming talent myth

Posted Apr 30, 2015 12:19 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

It wasn't meant to be detrimental to the achievement; it's even more impressive that it was a world record setter *as well as* being IOCCC-quality (heh, now there's a metric I'd like to see for codebases).

The programming talent myth

Posted Apr 30, 2015 6:44 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

...far more useful, stable, and long-lived product than Qemu ...

Isn't qemu now effectively immortalized as part of the standard virtualization solution for Linux?