7 ms·

First time I see his picture, and it’s a bit like someone’s revealed the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto when it’s clear they are going out of their way to protect

by sph 4mo ago

First time I see his picture, and it’s a bit like someone’s revealed the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto when it’s clear they are going out of their way to protect their privacy and stay out of the limelight. My impression is the guy had always better things to do than engage with the greater internet, like thinking real hard and solving difficult problems. Much respect to his work, but even more respect to his work ethic. When you have a strong vision, you need the ivory tower style of development rather than spending your days arguing and defending your choices with internet strangers.

bitwize 4mo ago
As I say, Bellard is Mozart when most of us can't even hope to be Salieri.
- audunw 4mo ago
  Mozart doesn’t feel right. The code isn’t beautiful and elegant. It’s not built to last (at least for ffmpeg) or be some kind of masterpiece. He writes code to get a job done or tickle some intellectual curiosity. It’s not beautiful but that’s OK. I think Unicorn illustrates one of the issues with his style. It wouldn’t have needed to exist of the QEMU code was architected into neat components. But then writing spaghetti code that gets the job done is why he’s so fast and effective. It’s a trade off https://www.unicorn-engine.org/docs/beyond_qemu.html https://www.unicorn-engine.org/docs/beyond_qemu.html I think there’s actually a sharp contrast with John Carmack here. Fabrice might be smarter and faster but Carmack is perhaps a better software engineer. You can really see the development of his style from Doom and Quake source code, where Quake 3 source is like a beautiful gem of a code base.
  - vkazanov 4mo ago
    True. Carmack was polishing idtech for a decade, and his work is always pleasant to tinker with. Now, what is outstanding in Fabrice's work is that his curiousity projects often end up being breakthroughs. I mean, i have like hundreds of these. Can emacs do that? I make a compiler to do that? How fast can i make this bytrcode to run? And it is cute at best.
  - SwellJoe 4mo ago
    "It’s not beautiful but that’s OK." Really? I find his code elegant and concise.
  - hnlmorg 4mo ago
    I think developers sometimes get too obsessed with code quality thinking that smarter code makes them a better developer. In fact I’ve seen developers fall into the trap of mistaking their code as the product and thus spend so much time beautifying it that that fail to ever release anything. Then you have the other end of the spectrum where people are too focused on hacking stuff together that the end result is unmaintainable. The reality is there needs to be a bit of both to be a good developer. For example, if you’re building a proof of concept (POC), then it’s more important to prove the idea than it is to define the architecture. And the reason for that is because you don’t always understand how the final product (whether it’s commercial software or a FOSS library) is best architected until you’ve gone through a few drafts of the idea. So spaghetti code isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But then when you know your idea works and you need to flesh it out into something more durable, you start to refactor the spaghetti into something more maintainable. Fabrice mainly releases POCs while Carmack mainly releases finished products. So it’s unsurprising you’ll see a difference in the style of architecting in their code. I used to be someone who focused on beautiful code for my POCs too. And used to fail to release any personal projects. Then one day I learned to embrace the chaos of POCs and realised that you can getting something built and tarting it up afterwards was better than failing to build anything at all.
    - 21asdffdsa12 4mo ago
      But the code quality is speed. And reach. You can not advance, unless you can read the code, you can understand the model, you can not scale beyond a certain point. The beauty of the architecture is the ability to build a spaceship compared to a train of kerosene tankers. Physically similar, but in capability radical different. I find this very scary. Somebody unable to perceive capabilities and tech-debt. If you can not perceive that- you should not be let near executive decisions or code-base evaluation. This is literally the difference between rocket-science and exploding failed projects. Everyone can pile up explosives, not everyone can go to space today. Its a great interview topic to filter this kind of candidate out of companies.
      - MomsAVoxell 4mo ago
        “You can read the code” .. is very, very important in the context of milliseconds, hours, days, weeks, months and years. And decades. Today, you might say that John/Fabrice’ code is readable/unreadable, but will that also be true in 5 years time, in a different cultural/technological era? Obviously yes in the case of these individuals - because the ecosystem their products have created is self-sustaining at a mass (consumer/social) level. I’ve built software which has shipped and effected the lives of millions, too. Many of us have. But I have not built a massive ecosystem by working on the right software which was adopted by millions of developers who read my code, was inspired by it, and used it for something in their own products - thus creating sub-ecosystems upon sub-ecosystems, a big sprawling tree of economy which spreads out into the mass of humanity who use technology. In this story we have two cases of individuals who have accomplished an extraordinary reach of software, in their own uniquely flavored ways - and this demonstrates that there are no absolute requirements to strip personality from the code - as long as its damn good code in the first place. >filter candidates out of companies It’s a great way to decide not to work at a company which managers do not understand the importance of architecture at various scales, milliseconds, seconds, hours, days, weeks ..
  - coldtea 4mo ago
    >Mozart doesn’t feel right. The code isn’t beautiful and elegant. It’s not built to last (at least for ffmpeg) or be some kind of masterpiece. Pedantic much? It's not about him writing elegant code like someone would write elegant music. It's a comparison about the skill level achieved, Mozart-level vs Salieri-level (and in the sense of their Amadeus movie rivalry, not real world). His code tackles very complex subjects, succesfully, with huge technical skill, and has been reliable and relied upon by millions...
  - sph 4mo ago
    > I think there’s actually a sharp contrast with John Carmack here. Fabrice might be smarter and faster but Carmack is perhaps a better software engineer. There’s few things I find more pathetic than trying really hard to show who’s best and ranking things that have no business being ranked. You will find humans are n-dimensional and elude these simplistic categories.
    - yaantc 4mo ago
      Yes, ranking requires reducing to a single dimension where all interesting things are multi-dimensions. This is a lossy process, which often tells more about the one(s) doing the ranking than what's ranked.
      - sph 4mo ago
        I was thinking of sport players that have their stats laid out as a radar chart. One might be average on defense, but a world class striker. Is he better than a world class defender but average striker? And even that is a convenient and lossy approximation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_chart
    - lambdaone 4mo ago
      Carmack and Bellard are both wizards, and trying to rank them is a fool's errand. Let's appreciate them both!
    - anthk 4mo ago
      Carmack it's a better engineer, but Bellard it's a better thinker and innovator. To each its own.
    - sp0rk 4mo ago
      > There’s few things I find more pathetic than trying really hard to show who’s best and ranking things that have no business being ranked. This seems like a strangely harsh response considering the person you're responding to is just restating the assertion that Carmack made in his tweet.
  - xyzzy123 4mo ago
    I wonder if what you're noticing in Fabrice's code is a lack of _abstraction_ beyond whats obviously needed to get the job done. It's not spaghetti IMHO, I think its what code looks like when you're smart enough to just hold most of the problem in your head. I am speculating a bit here, because I am not that smart. If I had to describe it in aesthetic terms I would maybe say brutalism?
  - moralestapia 4mo ago
    Oof, HN says the darndest things. OTOH it's fun to see people comparing programmers (better/worse) as if that actually mattered. As the internet says, post physique bro.
  - groceries8192 4mo ago
    > The code isn’t beautiful and elegant Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What you find beautiful, I would find grotesque, and vice versa. What you think of as well-organized, I think of as spaghetti. I think it's great that we can have such a diversity of viewpoints on beauty, but I wouldn't advise making universal proclamations on beauty standards.
- pwdisswordfishq 4mo ago
  Obsessed with poop?
shevy-java 4mo ago
I imagined him with wild, long hair; possibly tattoos, huge and heavy set. The picture destroyed my imagination - and now I want my imagination back. :(
- sph 4mo ago
  Except the ‘huge and heavy set’, you’re thinking of tokyospliff here.
  - huhtenberg 4mo ago
    Or some version of RMS :)
- taway20260616 4mo ago
  If you want your "imagination" back, go back to watching Netflix and Hollywood cliches.
- throwaway2037 4mo ago
  In my personal experience, uber French nerds don't really fit the Simpsons "Comic Book Guy" appearance stereotype. Anyone else reading this, feel free to disagree.
  - speedgoose 4mo ago
    Yes, it’s difficult to practice climbing if you are obese.
gaigalas 4mo ago
Honestly, two mythologized figures (Carmack and Bellard). They're good (like, quite good), but as soon as their names come up people start talking about some weird expectation of what they are supposed to think rather than the actual things they did. Somehow, that mythologizing diminishes their accomplishments.
- noufalibrahim 4mo ago
  Not exactly my idea. However, it's pleasant to see two people I admire so much having respect for each other.
- MomsAVoxell 4mo ago
  Oh, this is human nature and you will find it impossible to avoid this framing of cult figures, because they are indeed cult figures - albeit positively perceived ones, since they appear to not just be doing it for themselves, but altruistically every wonder they produce is for their users - and thus their works have effectively and productively impacted the lives of millions of other people, at economies of scale most of us here on HN aspire to. And it is that aspiration you’re degrading with the rush to de-mythologize, as if it weren’t inevitable, under the crushing rush of time, that we in the hacker world had heroes.
  - gaigalas 4mo ago
    Humanity has some 300.000 years of existing, and we can only trace back the prevalence of cult figures a few thousand years back. For all we know, it could be a temporary fluke and we'll snap back to something else. We could be beings with no default to snap back to, ever changing, destined to dissolve the prevalence of cult figures into something else in the following eras. In a few thousand years we could totally see this practice as some distant-past thing like making clay pots or carrying Roman dodecahedrons. The new cultural trend could become jumping off cliffs, and someone would be arguing that it's inevitable human nature. By the way, no rush to de-mythologize. I'm not fighting any dragon here, you do you.
    - 4mo ago
keyle 4mo ago
No he never hid his identity, if you looked him up, you found his picture. Satoshi shouldn't be compared, I don't hold bitcoins nor am I interested, but the name is a lore. It was stamped on the original document. Fabrice Bellard is a real person shipping code; not an internet anonymous identity.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- coldtea 4mo ago
  Parent knows. He makes an analogy, not an absolute equivalence.
  - bravetraveler 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - alfiedotwtf 4mo ago
      This thread is why he is not on Twitter
      - bravetraveler 4mo ago
        Fascinating, I'm not there for other reasons. So, about that costly Tea...
        herodoturtle 4mo ago
        And I'm here wondering if there's a limit to HN's nested replies.
        bravetraveler 4mo ago
        I'll continue to do my part as time allows, also curious. Anyway, if enough flag the top [like I did], it'll collapse.
Zardoz84 4mo ago
Sad that him can't show the same respect for "Burguer" Rebecca Ann Heineman.
- Quarrel 4mo ago
  err? afaik Bellard never had any beef with Burger Becky. Both are legendary programmers, but somewhat different eras. I have no idea what you're suggesting.
  - TheAmazingRace 4mo ago
    I think he was referring to Carmack's note on Burger Becky when she passed away.
    - Quarrel 4mo ago
      Ah, thanks, yeah, I just looked it up. I had no idea.

by sph 4mo ago

bitwize 4mo ago

As I say, Bellard is Mozart when most of us can't even hope to be Salieri.

audunw 4mo ago
Mozart doesn’t feel right. The code isn’t beautiful and elegant. It’s not built to last (at least for ffmpeg) or be some kind of masterpiece. He writes code to get a job done or tickle some intellectual curiosity. It’s not beautiful but that’s OK. I think Unicorn illustrates one of the issues with his style. It wouldn’t have needed to exist of the QEMU code was architected into neat components. But then writing spaghetti code that gets the job done is why he’s so fast and effective. It’s a trade off https://www.unicorn-engine.org/docs/beyond_qemu.html https://www.unicorn-engine.org/docs/beyond_qemu.html I think there’s actually a sharp contrast with John Carmack here. Fabrice might be smarter and faster but Carmack is perhaps a better software engineer. You can really see the development of his style from Doom and Quake source code, where Quake 3 source is like a beautiful gem of a code base.
- vkazanov 4mo ago
  True. Carmack was polishing idtech for a decade, and his work is always pleasant to tinker with. Now, what is outstanding in Fabrice's work is that his curiousity projects often end up being breakthroughs. I mean, i have like hundreds of these. Can emacs do that? I make a compiler to do that? How fast can i make this bytrcode to run? And it is cute at best.
- SwellJoe 4mo ago
  "It’s not beautiful but that’s OK." Really? I find his code elegant and concise.
- hnlmorg 4mo ago
  I think developers sometimes get too obsessed with code quality thinking that smarter code makes them a better developer. In fact I’ve seen developers fall into the trap of mistaking their code as the product and thus spend so much time beautifying it that that fail to ever release anything. Then you have the other end of the spectrum where people are too focused on hacking stuff together that the end result is unmaintainable. The reality is there needs to be a bit of both to be a good developer. For example, if you’re building a proof of concept (POC), then it’s more important to prove the idea than it is to define the architecture. And the reason for that is because you don’t always understand how the final product (whether it’s commercial software or a FOSS library) is best architected until you’ve gone through a few drafts of the idea. So spaghetti code isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But then when you know your idea works and you need to flesh it out into something more durable, you start to refactor the spaghetti into something more maintainable. Fabrice mainly releases POCs while Carmack mainly releases finished products. So it’s unsurprising you’ll see a difference in the style of architecting in their code. I used to be someone who focused on beautiful code for my POCs too. And used to fail to release any personal projects. Then one day I learned to embrace the chaos of POCs and realised that you can getting something built and tarting it up afterwards was better than failing to build anything at all.
  - 21asdffdsa12 4mo ago
    But the code quality is speed. And reach. You can not advance, unless you can read the code, you can understand the model, you can not scale beyond a certain point. The beauty of the architecture is the ability to build a spaceship compared to a train of kerosene tankers. Physically similar, but in capability radical different. I find this very scary. Somebody unable to perceive capabilities and tech-debt. If you can not perceive that- you should not be let near executive decisions or code-base evaluation. This is literally the difference between rocket-science and exploding failed projects. Everyone can pile up explosives, not everyone can go to space today. Its a great interview topic to filter this kind of candidate out of companies.
    - MomsAVoxell 4mo ago
      “You can read the code” .. is very, very important in the context of milliseconds, hours, days, weeks, months and years. And decades. Today, you might say that John/Fabrice’ code is readable/unreadable, but will that also be true in 5 years time, in a different cultural/technological era? Obviously yes in the case of these individuals - because the ecosystem their products have created is self-sustaining at a mass (consumer/social) level. I’ve built software which has shipped and effected the lives of millions, too. Many of us have. But I have not built a massive ecosystem by working on the right software which was adopted by millions of developers who read my code, was inspired by it, and used it for something in their own products - thus creating sub-ecosystems upon sub-ecosystems, a big sprawling tree of economy which spreads out into the mass of humanity who use technology. In this story we have two cases of individuals who have accomplished an extraordinary reach of software, in their own uniquely flavored ways - and this demonstrates that there are no absolute requirements to strip personality from the code - as long as its damn good code in the first place. >filter candidates out of companies It’s a great way to decide not to work at a company which managers do not understand the importance of architecture at various scales, milliseconds, seconds, hours, days, weeks ..
- coldtea 4mo ago
  >Mozart doesn’t feel right. The code isn’t beautiful and elegant. It’s not built to last (at least for ffmpeg) or be some kind of masterpiece. Pedantic much? It's not about him writing elegant code like someone would write elegant music. It's a comparison about the skill level achieved, Mozart-level vs Salieri-level (and in the sense of their Amadeus movie rivalry, not real world). His code tackles very complex subjects, succesfully, with huge technical skill, and has been reliable and relied upon by millions...
- sph 4mo ago
  > I think there’s actually a sharp contrast with John Carmack here. Fabrice might be smarter and faster but Carmack is perhaps a better software engineer. There’s few things I find more pathetic than trying really hard to show who’s best and ranking things that have no business being ranked. You will find humans are n-dimensional and elude these simplistic categories.
  - yaantc 4mo ago
    Yes, ranking requires reducing to a single dimension where all interesting things are multi-dimensions. This is a lossy process, which often tells more about the one(s) doing the ranking than what's ranked.
    - sph 4mo ago
      I was thinking of sport players that have their stats laid out as a radar chart. One might be average on defense, but a world class striker. Is he better than a world class defender but average striker? And even that is a convenient and lossy approximation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_chart
  - lambdaone 4mo ago
    Carmack and Bellard are both wizards, and trying to rank them is a fool's errand. Let's appreciate them both!
  - anthk 4mo ago
    Carmack it's a better engineer, but Bellard it's a better thinker and innovator. To each its own.
  - sp0rk 4mo ago
    > There’s few things I find more pathetic than trying really hard to show who’s best and ranking things that have no business being ranked. This seems like a strangely harsh response considering the person you're responding to is just restating the assertion that Carmack made in his tweet.
- xyzzy123 4mo ago
  I wonder if what you're noticing in Fabrice's code is a lack of _abstraction_ beyond whats obviously needed to get the job done. It's not spaghetti IMHO, I think its what code looks like when you're smart enough to just hold most of the problem in your head. I am speculating a bit here, because I am not that smart. If I had to describe it in aesthetic terms I would maybe say brutalism?
- moralestapia 4mo ago
  Oof, HN says the darndest things. OTOH it's fun to see people comparing programmers (better/worse) as if that actually mattered. As the internet says, post physique bro.
- groceries8192 4mo ago
  > The code isn’t beautiful and elegant Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What you find beautiful, I would find grotesque, and vice versa. What you think of as well-organized, I think of as spaghetti. I think it's great that we can have such a diversity of viewpoints on beauty, but I wouldn't advise making universal proclamations on beauty standards.
pwdisswordfishq 4mo ago
Obsessed with poop?

shevy-java 4mo ago

I imagined him with wild, long hair; possibly tattoos, huge and heavy set. The picture destroyed my imagination - and now I want my imagination back. :(

sph 4mo ago
Except the ‘huge and heavy set’, you’re thinking of tokyospliff here.
- huhtenberg 4mo ago
  Or some version of RMS :)
taway20260616 4mo ago
If you want your "imagination" back, go back to watching Netflix and Hollywood cliches.
throwaway2037 4mo ago
In my personal experience, uber French nerds don't really fit the Simpsons "Comic Book Guy" appearance stereotype. Anyone else reading this, feel free to disagree.
- speedgoose 4mo ago
  Yes, it’s difficult to practice climbing if you are obese.

gaigalas 4mo ago

Honestly, two mythologized figures (Carmack and Bellard). They're good (like, quite good), but as soon as their names come up people start talking about some weird expectation of what they are supposed to think rather than the actual things they did. Somehow, that mythologizing diminishes their accomplishments.

noufalibrahim 4mo ago
Not exactly my idea. However, it's pleasant to see two people I admire so much having respect for each other.
MomsAVoxell 4mo ago
Oh, this is human nature and you will find it impossible to avoid this framing of cult figures, because they are indeed cult figures - albeit positively perceived ones, since they appear to not just be doing it for themselves, but altruistically every wonder they produce is for their users - and thus their works have effectively and productively impacted the lives of millions of other people, at economies of scale most of us here on HN aspire to. And it is that aspiration you’re degrading with the rush to de-mythologize, as if it weren’t inevitable, under the crushing rush of time, that we in the hacker world had heroes.
- gaigalas 4mo ago
  Humanity has some 300.000 years of existing, and we can only trace back the prevalence of cult figures a few thousand years back. For all we know, it could be a temporary fluke and we'll snap back to something else. We could be beings with no default to snap back to, ever changing, destined to dissolve the prevalence of cult figures into something else in the following eras. In a few thousand years we could totally see this practice as some distant-past thing like making clay pots or carrying Roman dodecahedrons. The new cultural trend could become jumping off cliffs, and someone would be arguing that it's inevitable human nature. By the way, no rush to de-mythologize. I'm not fighting any dragon here, you do you.
  - 4mo ago

keyle 4mo ago

No he never hid his identity, if you looked him up, you found his picture. Satoshi shouldn't be compared, I don't hold bitcoins nor am I interested, but the name is a lore. It was stamped on the original document. Fabrice Bellard is a real person shipping code; not an internet anonymous identity.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
coldtea 4mo ago
Parent knows. He makes an analogy, not an absolute equivalence.
- bravetraveler 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - alfiedotwtf 4mo ago
    This thread is why he is not on Twitter
    - bravetraveler 4mo ago
      Fascinating, I'm not there for other reasons. So, about that costly Tea...
      - herodoturtle 4mo ago
        And I'm here wondering if there's a limit to HN's nested replies.
        bravetraveler 4mo ago
        I'll continue to do my part as time allows, also curious. Anyway, if enough flag the top [like I did], it'll collapse.

Zardoz84 4mo ago

Sad that him can't show the same respect for "Burguer" Rebecca Ann Heineman.

Quarrel 4mo ago
err? afaik Bellard never had any beef with Burger Becky. Both are legendary programmers, but somewhat different eras. I have no idea what you're suggesting.
- TheAmazingRace 4mo ago
  I think he was referring to Carmack's note on Burger Becky when she passed away.
  - Quarrel 4mo ago
    Ah, thanks, yeah, I just looked it up. I had no idea.