Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
Friend who is not a software person sent me this tweet, which amused me as it did them. They asked if "runk" was real, which I assume not.
But what are some good examples of real ones like this? xz became famous for the hack of course, so i then read a bit about how important this compression algorithm is/was.
It's okay you can just say FFmpeg
Also Linux
Also CoreJS
Also
Although it's now a larger organization, Redis was started and maintained by some guy that just wanted to make his website faster. It's very widely deployed.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are the classic example. Jobs has some technical skill, but not a lot. He's the "ideas guy" that all other "ideas guy" try to be. I don't have a lot of respect for the "idea guy"; Jobs was a manipulative narcissist, and he should not be emulated.
Woz, OTOH, is an absolute genius, and one of the most genuinely nice people you'll ever meet. Apple made him enough money that he can do whatever he wanted with his life, and what he wanted was to do cool things with computers and pull harmless pranks.
Bill Gates had Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen. That was more of a collaboration. They all had some level of technical and business skill mixed together. It wasn't quite the complementary skillset we see with Jobs and Woz. A lot of Microsoft's success was being in the right place at the right time to make the right deal.
Is-even and is-odd on npm.
For a while, openssl was maintained by 1 or 2 people.
Git, by Linus? Maybe even linux itself? Ok actually Linus might just be Steve Wozniak without an annoying Steve Jobs guy next to him, while actually being a lot bigger than Apple maybe?
It's really hard to imagine a world without Git. If it hadn't been invented I think it would have been necessary to create it it's one of those things that's hard to imagine and then impossible to work out how you can survive without it.
Yet the vast majority of the world probably don't even know what it is, and wouldn't even understand it if it was explained to them.
Git is not the only version control software out there, and not the first one either.
Facebook for example is famous for not using git. Because their own modified copy of mercurial fits their needs better.
Microsoft didn't use git until relatively recently either. They had to make some big contributions to make it work for their system.
their own modified copy of mercurial fits their needs better
The version I heard was that hg people were way nicer to them and very much willing to help compared to git.
I feel like Linus got a taste of his own medicine dealing with Gtk and Gnome people while developing Subsurface and that caused them to switch to Qt.
I remember those days. I used mercurial and svn. And file locking in other solutions.
I'm so happy with git.
Everybody would use Mercurial, since Fossil completely lost the race, and both Subversion and CVS are unfit for today's needs.
What is too bad, because Fossil would be much more productive than Git or Mercurial if the software just finished running at all; and Mercurial is way easier to learn than Git.
I'd say ffmpeg is a good example, it's used by almost every piece of software that has to manipulate audio or video (including messaging applications), yet not many people know about its existance.
And Fabrice Bellard, the original author of ffmpeg, went on to create qemu which pretty much made open-source virtualization possible. Also TCC (even if I don't think that one is widely used), he established a world record for computing decimals of Pi using a single machine that had ~2000× less FLOPS than the previous record, and so much more...
Fabric Bellard's body of work is fairly strong evidence for time travel having happened already.
Or just genius.
I nominate Paul Eggert and Arthur Olson before him, for the tz database, which we all depend upon whenever the time at which something happens (or did or will happen) matters.
Edit: Tom Scott touches on the subject here.
When the US came close to going on permanent daylight savings time there were interesting discussions there.
Paul Eggart is the primary maintainer for tzdb, and has been for the past 20 years.
Tzdb is the database that maintains all of the information about timezones, timezone changes, leap whatever's and everything else. It's present on just about every computer on the planet and plays an important role in making sure all of the things do time correctly.
If he gets hit by a bus, ICANN is responsible for finding someone else to maintain the list.
Sqlite is the most widely used database engine, and is primarily developed by a small handful of people.
ImageMagick is probably the most iconic example. Primarily developed by John Cristy since 1987, it's used in a hilarious number of places for basic image operations. When a security bug was found in it a bit ago, basically every server needed to be patched because they all do something with images.
Pretty much every basic terminal command for linux. Grep is the one that comes to mind.
