Comment by bpires | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bpires | Hacker News Reader

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I thought Jeff Dean was the 'Chuck Norris' of programming. He designed (with others) a lot of Google's biggest infrastructure projects as well as multiple iterations of the main search infrastructure.

Among others, the projects he's worked on include:

Spanner - a scalable, multi-version, globally distributed, and synchronously replicated database

Some of the production system design and statistical machine translation system for Google Translate.

BigTable, a large-scale semi-structured storage system.

MapReduce a system for large-scale data processing applications.

Google Brain a system for large-scale artificial neural networks

LevelDB an open source on-disk key-value store.

TensorFlow an open source machine learning software library.

See http://www.wired.com/2012/08/google-as-xerox-parc/all/

https://www.quora.com/Who-is-Jeff-Dean

John Skeet is the spelling-bee champ.

Jeff Dean is the award winning novelist.

That's what I was thinking when I saw him on the list. I've been studying top industrial, FOSS, and CompSci projects for years. I see certain names, like Dean or esp DJB, that turn up over and over in high-quality, clever work they help code. Then, I find they instead list someone who was answering questions on SO. Hmmm.

To be fair, in case he deserves the credit, I did ask him to elaborate in another comment. Most programming in our industry is people solving day to day problems. They encounter all kinds of issues that hold our collective productivity back. Having a one-stop answer to most is very valuable. I think it's worth giving Skeet a high honor if he's done a huge chunk of that and done it well. I just think it should be a different title or type of honor along the lines of educating programmers instead of one that seems to imply his skill of designing/programming.

If Jeff Dean built Google, Jon Skeet is my Google. Atleast until Google is able to tell me where my program is supposed to store local files on the twenty different versions of Windows.

I have a big respect for Jon Skeet, but to dismiss Jeff Dean's work because Skeet is the one who provides copy-and-paste snippets for programmers is wrong on so many levels.

There's also literal Chuck Norris style Jeff Dean jokes... Like a whole bunch of them:

https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-facts

Well... http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts

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