D. J. Bernstein Is the Greatest Programmer in the History of the World (2009)

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20 points·rfreytag··9 comments

The only person I could think of that comes close is Fabrice Ballard (qemu, ffmpeg) Linux Torvalds (git, the Linux kernel, but one was affected by the popularity of the other)

I'd say Teh Carmack is up there.

The quake and doom code bases with their novel techniques are definitely on this level. The man has some serious implementation chops.

Git is the worst piece of software I actually use. It is impossible to use safely and without headaches unless (a) you only do the same, simple things every time, or (b) you're an expert. And yet, pretty much all programmers have to use it every day.

That might be a bit strong. But i'd agree that neither Linux nor Git are examples of good code as such - they're examples of adequate code implementing a difficult idea to produce something extremely useful.

Have you tried it with magit?

I haven't because I'm not an emacs user, but it seems to me to be very much in the right direction.

As I didn't make clear in my original post, I've never seen the git source. When I say it sucks I mean strictly that the user interface sucks, so this kind of thing makes great sense to me.

I understood you were addressing the terrifying user interface.

This is heresy against the prophets K&R!

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