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> No other programmer has this kind of track record. Donald Knuth probably comes closest, but his diary about writing TeX (printed in Literate Programming) show

by l0stman 17y ago

> No other programmer has this kind of track record. Donald Knuth probably comes closest, but his diary about writing TeX (printed in Literate Programming) shows how he kept finding bugs for years and never expected to be finished, only to get closer and closer (thus the odd version numbering scheme). I don't want to be dismissive but I think TeX is more complex and uses non trivial algorithms. So it's like comparing an apple to an orange.

jacquesm 17y ago
Anybody that says an email server is 'non trivial' hasn't looked at the guts of one yet.
- tptacek 17y ago
  As someone who has hacked mail servers, written DNS servers, and come within 100 miles of typesetting, I'm going to throw in my vote that TeX addresses a much harder problem than qmail.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    No contest there, but qmail is far from 'trivial'. If you're going to compare qmail to something else though I think it should be compared to sendmail (or postfix for that matter), not to TeX. Personally I think djb is a great coder, but there are quite a few of those around. Programming is not a single-valued enterprise anyway, so best is a very hard to measure quantity, as good as meaningless. But I know 'bad' when I see it :)
    - tptacek 17y ago
      The algorithms and pure theoretical CS in qmail actually is trivial. From what I remember, pretty much the only genuinely interesting thing in it is how he implemented his hash table. From a systems programming perspective, qmail is not only nontrivial, but actually groundbreaking. His allocator design, the way he architected his libc replacement, the extent to which he takes advantage of bare-metal Unix programming (look at his queue notification mechanism), it's all really cool stuff. But there's a big difference between theoretical CS and systems programming, and the parent commenter is right to point out that TeX is more complicated from a CS perspective than qmail is.

by l0stman 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago

Anybody that says an email server is 'non trivial' hasn't looked at the guts of one yet.

tptacek 17y ago
As someone who has hacked mail servers, written DNS servers, and come within 100 miles of typesetting, I'm going to throw in my vote that TeX addresses a much harder problem than qmail.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  No contest there, but qmail is far from 'trivial'. If you're going to compare qmail to something else though I think it should be compared to sendmail (or postfix for that matter), not to TeX. Personally I think djb is a great coder, but there are quite a few of those around. Programming is not a single-valued enterprise anyway, so best is a very hard to measure quantity, as good as meaningless. But I know 'bad' when I see it :)
  - tptacek 17y ago
    The algorithms and pure theoretical CS in qmail actually is trivial. From what I remember, pretty much the only genuinely interesting thing in it is how he implemented his hash table. From a systems programming perspective, qmail is not only nontrivial, but actually groundbreaking. His allocator design, the way he architected his libc replacement, the extent to which he takes advantage of bare-metal Unix programming (look at his queue notification mechanism), it's all really cool stuff. But there's a big difference between theoretical CS and systems programming, and the parent commenter is right to point out that TeX is more complicated from a CS perspective than qmail is.