4 ms·

Ask HN: What are the '7 wonders' of the coding world?

8 points by vinnyglennon 10y ago

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
Well, the 7 wonders of the world were things that you could go see. It seems reasonable to say, then, that the 7 wonders of the coding world have to be things to which you can see the source code. I'd nominate a few: Linux The Fast Fourier Transform Lisp (whichever version you like best out of the ones where you can get your hands on the source)
- cevi 10y ago
  More nominations: Hashlife (golly) SAT-solvers (minisat, glucose, lingeling, ...) Convex optimization (CVXOPT, ...)
FroshKiller 10y ago
I don't know about the seven wonders, but I can tell you my personal ones: fast inverse square root MP3 BitTorrent Git Bitcoin AWS fast Fourier transform
angersock 10y ago
I'll only go with things you can read the source code of: The Quake 1-3 engines. Truly groundbreaking for each one, and easily understandable by mere mortals. They were critical in the adoption of consumer GPUs and in network gaming. With modding and everything else, they basically created an entire industry. PostgreSQL. Amazing RDBMS that has a long history and is also very approachable by the layman. It sets new records for technical writing as well, and is in widespread use. Linux. Hugely important, full of smart and not-smart pieces, and the backbone of a lot of the computing world today. Plan 9. Maybe the best version of Unix ever made, and very approachable in both its system design and implementation. It's a future that never came to pass, but is hugely interesting. BLAS/LAPACK. Gigantic and scary piles of optimizations for numerical linear algebra, but of utterly unmatched importance (barring maybe the FFT). Everything behind control and data modeling today relies on this. Erlang's BEAM. Another very approachable VM, and one that has an amazing track record. Combined with OTP, this powers a lot of very important telecom and other systems. MUMPS. A dark wonder, but almost all healthcare interacts with a MUMPS runtime at one point or another. A sobering reminder that we as engineers can do horrible things that will stay in production for decades and maybe even kill people.
- sigjuice 10y ago
  What do you consider the non-smart pieces of Linux? Thanks!
  - angersock 10y ago
    The OOM killer, the graphics and audio stack (arguably a userland problem, but still), various other things. A lot of the baggage inherited from being Unix-ish.
dwe3000 10y ago
I don't know if this follows the spirit of the question, but if I consider a 'wonder' as something that had a major affect on the coding world, wouldn't some virus/Trojans be applicable? Like the first, whichever that might technically be, but I'm thinking of the Morris worm [1], though I know it wasn't the first. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm
Saturnaut 10y ago
Linux SQL HTTP BitTorrent Git Blockchain Neural Networks

8 points by vinnyglennon 10y ago

Well, the 7 wonders of the world were things that you could go see. It seems reasonable to say, then, that the 7 wonders of the coding world have to be things to which you can see the source code. I'd nominate a few: Linux The Fast Fourier Transform Lisp (whichever version you like best out of the ones where you can get your hands on the source)

cevi 10y ago
More nominations: Hashlife (golly) SAT-solvers (minisat, glucose, lingeling, ...) Convex optimization (CVXOPT, ...)

FroshKiller 10y ago

I don't know about the seven wonders, but I can tell you my personal ones: fast inverse square root MP3 BitTorrent Git Bitcoin AWS fast Fourier transform

angersock 10y ago

I'll only go with things you can read the source code of: The Quake 1-3 engines. Truly groundbreaking for each one, and easily understandable by mere mortals. They were critical in the adoption of consumer GPUs and in network gaming. With modding and everything else, they basically created an entire industry. PostgreSQL. Amazing RDBMS that has a long history and is also very approachable by the layman. It sets new records for technical writing as well, and is in widespread use. Linux. Hugely important, full of smart and not-smart pieces, and the backbone of a lot of the computing world today. Plan 9. Maybe the best version of Unix ever made, and very approachable in both its system design and implementation. It's a future that never came to pass, but is hugely interesting. BLAS/LAPACK. Gigantic and scary piles of optimizations for numerical linear algebra, but of utterly unmatched importance (barring maybe the FFT). Everything behind control and data modeling today relies on this. Erlang's BEAM. Another very approachable VM, and one that has an amazing track record. Combined with OTP, this powers a lot of very important telecom and other systems. MUMPS. A dark wonder, but almost all healthcare interacts with a MUMPS runtime at one point or another. A sobering reminder that we as engineers can do horrible things that will stay in production for decades and maybe even kill people.

sigjuice 10y ago
What do you consider the non-smart pieces of Linux? Thanks!
- angersock 10y ago
  The OOM killer, the graphics and audio stack (arguably a userland problem, but still), various other things. A lot of the baggage inherited from being Unix-ish.

dwe3000 10y ago

I don't know if this follows the spirit of the question, but if I consider a 'wonder' as something that had a major affect on the coding world, wouldn't some virus/Trojans be applicable? Like the first, whichever that might technically be, but I'm thinking of the Morris worm [1], though I know it wasn't the first. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

Saturnaut 10y ago

Linux SQL HTTP BitTorrent Git Blockchain Neural Networks