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Comment by jemfinch | Hacker News Reader

I'm still struggling to figure out why ESR is relevant, or ever was relevant, for that matter. As far as I can tell, his most significant engineering accomplishment was fetchmail, and I'm not sure many here would call it very significant these days.

(I'm willing to accept the downvotes I'll likely get if only someone will answer me on this point.)

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Apart from his being a great public advocate for open source software, he wrote "The Art of Unix Programming" and "The Cathedral and The Bazaar" -- both very influential.

The Art of Unix Programming is even a good book! I though can't stand ESR's rhetoric.

Struggle no more!

How can anyone forget his seminal work - Sex Tips for Geeks

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/

Also ncurses (which is still widely used) and a large amount of GNU Emacs code. I cannot comment on how much of the code that is in use in those tools now is still his, but I don't think that matters. But probably his writing and advocacy for Open Source is more influential than his code.

Well that's a silly comment. Is your entire life based around percieved relevance?

Zuckerberg could be considered "more relevant", but that doesn't make him a good person with morals.

How does it matter whether ESR is (or was ever) relevant or not?

his historical relevance to hackerdom was firmly cemented by his work on the jargon file, in my opinion.

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