Ask HN: Who is your programming (ideally open source) guru / role model?

7 points by zajkowskimarcin 8 years ago | 9 comments

I'm preparing a talk about open source and general contribution to software (in terms of development). How it may help us to get a better job, become a better person or just feel good in terms of self-realisation.

I've asked about it my followers on [Twitter] (https://twitter.com/zajkowskimarcin/status/974203034216665089) and I noticed that people are either not having their coding 'gurus' or are not admitting / sharing info about them.

So...

Who is yours #opensource (and maybe not only) guru / inspiration / authority / role model? Do you have one? Do you find inspiration in someone else's code?

I'm gathering GOOD (and also BAD - feel free to share both) examples of companies and people in the #oss movement for my talk. But here, maybe go one step beyond open source and let's speak about general peogramming and programmers.

Any help appreciated. Looking for an amazing discussion and some more inspirational and like-minded people to follow and learn about their life stories.

zer00eyz 8 years ago |

I'm going to give an answer that some people won't like, and to be honest I don't like either:

Richard Stallman.

I no longer care about the "super coder" or the "smart dude" or the "rock star" because it doesn't really matter. Good and bad coders are both capable of getting things done.

Stallman is, for lack of a better word, a zealot. For as much as that may be off putting at times, he really isn't wrong. Closed source and closed design, starting at the hardware layer, has bitten us rather badly in recent days. This isn't the first time, it won't be the last, and until we collectively demand more it simply won't change.

There are other people who I have deep respect for and look up to, Bunnie Huang and Salvatore Sanfilippo spring to mind as people I keep an eye on there are more but those are off the top of my head.

open-source-ux 8 years ago |

I greatly admire Niklaus Wirth (although not as a guru or role model as such).

Wirth created Pascal, then Modula-2 and then Oberon. He's 84 and has a career that stretches back to Algol in the 1960s. He has gained enormous insight into the design of programming languages and compilers.

He has always strived for simplicity in compiler and language design, but without sacrificing power and expressiveness. When he created Oberon, he created a language specification that was a mere 16 pages! That language was then used to build an entire operating system.

He lamented over 20 years ago that as hardware gets faster, software gets slower. A statement that still rings true today for many programs.

Anything Wirth writes or speaks about is worth reading (even if you find much to disagree). But is anyone listening to what he has to say?

"The wealth of features of many languages is indeed a problem rather than a solution. A multitude of features is another consequence of the programmers' belief that the value of a language is proportional to the quantity of its features and facilities, bells and whistles.

However, we know that it is better if each basic concept is represented by a single, designated language construct. Not only does this reduce the effort of learning, but it reduces the volume of the language's description and thereby the possibilities of inconsistency and of misunderstanding.

Keeping a language as simple and as regular as possible has always been a guideline in my work; the description of Pascal took some 50 pages, that of Modula 40, and Oberon's a mere 16 pages. This I still consider to have been genuine progress."

From a 1997 interview: http://www.eptacom.net/pubblicazioni/pub_eng/wirth.html

ioddly 8 years ago |

Fabrice Bellard: https://bellard.org

No social media. Just shows up every year or two with something that would be a decade-long project for most people.

DamnYuppie 8 years ago |

Those who have most impacted my development are the creator of Ruby on Rails David Heinemeier Hansson and John Resig who started the JQuery library.

Nomentatus 8 years ago |

Several - those who've tackled the business model problem with at least some innovative success. Starting with the MySQL guy.

zajkowskimarcin 8 years ago | |

Nice one! I forgot about Michael Widenius. Any more names or pointers? Feel free to share more of them. Thanks in advance.

quantummkv 8 years ago |

There is Matt Mullenweg, responsible for powering about a quarter of the internet with Wordpress.

valeg 8 years ago |

Linus Torvalds, he's a doer.

KyleMarMc 8 years ago |

Julia Evans - https://jvns.ca/.

She is fantastic at unpicking supposedly "hard" technical subjects in order to better understand them, which is one of the marks of a hacker. Not only that, she is great at communicating those subjects to others. In that respect, she is indeed inspirational - she inspires that level of inquisitiveness and deep stack knowledge.