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 ethic. When you have a strong vision, you need the ivory tower style of development rather than spending your days arguing and defending your choices with internet strangers.
https://www.ipaidia.gr/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/117-2020-f...
I don't know a single name behind the construction of the AI tensor core in Nvidia's chips but it is effectively what runs all of AI.
I'd hazard a guess that most people who run Internet things know who Fabrice Bellard is, and may indeed have spoken to him at some point.
I think I first noticed this either with regard to JSLinux, or possibly some software he wrote before that; don't fully remember which year. It's like some people go deliberately to more unique problems with regards to software that actually works in achieving that outcome, whatever the outcome may be.
I've always had a lot of admiration for Fabrice Bellard, I always wished I was as good an engineer as he is.
Satoshi shouldn't be compared, I don't hold bitcoins nor am I interested, but the name is a lore. It was stamped on the original document.
Fabrice Bellard is a real person shipping code; not an internet anonymous identity.
They're good (like, quite good), but as soon as their names come up people start talking about some weird expectation of what they are supposed to think rather than the actual things they did.
Somehow, that mythologizing diminishes their accomplishments.
... do tech people really not know who Fabrice Bellard is?
He's kind of a household name in a lot of programming circles
> 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...
>A quiet French engineer who never moved to Silicon Valley wrote the code that quietly runs the internet.
Why do some assume you need to move to SV to make an impact in tech?
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?
It has a full list of his projects.
I get what the author is saying but I really dislike this hyperbole. The Internet will be absolutely fine if FFmpeg suddenly disappears.
Companies that rely on it in the core of their product may not, but the Internet absolutely will, and the vast majority of websites and other Internet services will keep working just fine.
I guess that if people aren't loud on social media, people tend to ignore them.
Respect to those who posted their praise of someone else on social media. We need more of this.
>programming circles
Well, not all tech people are part of some curcles I guess.
Or they just don't know tech outside of SV, which is understandable, considering the rest doesn't do nearly the same amount of self-promotion and, well, they're not from SV anyway so why should SV care?
The other day there was this article: something something nerds, which assumed (almost) everyone in tech was looking up to Jobs and Wozniak.
I think I saw my first Mac in 2006 or so and only for a brief moment - it belonged to an artist the parents of my high school friend employed. The next time it was a musician. That was really the stereotype in my corner of the world at the time and using Apple devices for programming seemed like a weird idea.
It’s also a nod to his own fame.
[1] This is based on Masters of Doom. And the anecdotes are probably from the 90’s. And being arrogant does not mean that being confident in one’s ability is unjustified or that they are in fact not skilled. Being arrogant and being highly skilled are completely orthogonal.
Most of the code in the linux kernel today is not from Linus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard
Surely we are all capable of understanding Bellard’s contributions and judge them on their own merits without needing some famous programmer to point directly at it and saying “this good”.
Carmack's "almost certainly" doesn't look good here.
I don't need to know who is building VLC, curl, ffmpeg or any of the other essentials in my life. I just appreciate their work and pitch in some money if possible.
2) avoid qualifiers in personal compliments (unless ironic)
There is no almost John.
One of you has kept shipping for 30 years, the other one has spent most of the last couple of years in courts for stealing from former employers or on social media promoting being toxic and "anti woke" (whatever that is).
For me Michael Abrash (Quake, xbox) is a much better developer and person.
eg: I grew up in the Australian Kimberley region (kind of remote), spent decades in geophysical mapping, multi channel data processing, computational algebra, and other odd niches, have no real interest in SV, and am quite familiar with Bellard's work.
No idea who DHH is though.
Bellard did multiple breakthroughs: ffmpeg, qemu, tcc, jslinux, a state of the art FFT algorithm. I probable skipped a few.
With all due respect to carmack, a single ballard's projects would put anybody into the eternal hall of programmers fame right next to Linus, Carmack, Stallman, the Bell labs crowd and others.
i do understand how carmack did what he did logistically (time, effort, skills, compensation)...
Fabrice is just out of this world. When? How? Why? No idea.
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.
Specifically way too many authors whose books I've loved have turned out to be not very good human beings. David Eddings and Neil Gaiman are pretty good examples of this.
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.
I'm pretty sure most of the people who did "web stuff" at the time and used twitter (key point maybe) know him simply because you'd often see his tweets. Regardless of coutry (I'm from Russia, for exampl)
I stand by that decision, for various reasons.
Not least being that "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" gave me the ick.
https://bellard.org/pi/pi_bin.pdf
Though I have to say the last line of the proof "...which gives (1) by reordering the terms" took me much head scratching to understand!
What about the url on the first displayed line?
Not saying it's bad - got me thinking about this self-reference that most modern websites do with the logo on the header.
It's literally just a list of <p> tags. This is ridiculous. It's running a single sentence across the entire window.
In fact, if you ask me, I think the tweet's picture is semi-real; I trust the computer history museum to have the original and the tweet has an AI-upscaled photo with artificial details.
Chronological or Alphabetical sorting would make more sense than importance.
Why?
For most of the internet users- very likely no. Social media and video streaming IS the internet for the majority
You can push it if you want to maximize horizontal space utilization - the site you're on right now, for example, caps reflowing text to about 1200px - but reading is easier when you have to scan over less horizontal distance, and there's literally no reason not to set some max-width.