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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This article has not really all that much to do with Daniel Bernstein's legacy, which almost certainly won't have much to do with qmail, djbdns, and daemontools --- none of these are tools you're likely to pick up anymore, and that's for the good; they were important in their time but also an evolutionary dead end.

What I've learned from 27 years of working in subfields where Bernstein is prominent is that there are elements of his reputation that are probably well-earned. I used to believe (with, I think, good reason) that people who had viscerally negative opinions of him were betraying something important (and bad) about themselves. That might have been true at the time (call it '96-'06). It's less true now.

Regardless: Bernstein is important because of Curve25519, Ed25519 and ChaPoly. And those are huge contributions, and more or less not up for debate, unlike his C code.

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He stopped working on the software, but certainly daemontools could have been systemd, qmail could have been the dominant mailer etc. if he had continued.

I still think his way of organizing configuration files on the filesystem, the modularity of qmail and the elegance of daemontools are unsurpassed. You feel that you understand what is going on, and it isn't a chore to work with the software.

He didn't have time to form a "community" of contributors, and most contributors would have ruined the software anyway. He didn't work for $BIGCORP that would have foisted the software on everyone.

In reality, most OSS we use is because of marketing efforts of a "community" or a corporation (there are exceptions like the Linux kernel or gcc).

FWIW, the spirit of daemontools lives on in the s6 project.

https://skarnet.org/software/s6/

> I used to believe (with, I think, good reason) that people who had viscerally negative opinions of him were betraying something important (and bad) about themselves. That might have been true at the time (call it '96-'06). It's less true now.

So… what do you dislike about his C code? It would be interesting to hear what a viscerally negative but correct opinion about code would look like.

It’s certainly difficult to write C well. But it’s hard to imagine you saying something like that about cperciva’s. Did djb do something to earn it?

I have basically no experience with his code, but it sounds like you could teach readers something about what you’ve seen.

It’s notoriously cryptic, undercommented, and heavy on idiosyncracies, particularly the macros.

Nevertheless you can learn a lot from deciphering djb’s source, particularly with regards to defensive programming, so don’t be afraid to dive in. Just recognise it wasn’t necessarily engineered for ease of collaboration. Once you get a feel for the internal structures you may be surprised how clearly you can reason about it.

Perhaps it’s a matter of taste but I always preferred working on Wietse Venema and Timo Sirainen’s code.

Indeed, and Venema's Postfix was a huge win for sysadmins at the time who were sick of sendmail and didn't like the "half required batteries included" approach of qmail, eg. dealing with spotty support for Maildir in other software.

Uet Maildir + indexes is used now by almost every imap implementation.

I think it's important to realize that djb's code is an artifact of the era when it was written -- the 1990s, before C99 existed. A lot of his code would be far more readable if "translated" to use types and standard library functions which exist in modern C but didn't exist at the time.

I don’t have a strong opinion about it. I have held varying opinions over the years, but my take now is that outside of the kernel, I’m over C, much as I still enjoy writing it.

Also, a fair amount of macros to make it build on different platforms with varying endianess, alignment needs, differently named syscalls/functions, and so on.

People dislike the style. However if style actually mattered in terms of the whether or not the code is useful, then no one would be using his cryptography contributions, let alone calling them his only "important" contribution, because the cryptography was written in the same style as the programs he wrote in the 1990s. (Bias: I still use them everyday.)

Bernstein is still important and relevant today. He is part of the movement that is actively attempting to address quantum.

The normal way to describe that movement is “the field of cryptography”. Lots of people are working on it, and almost everyone pays attention to it.

You mean with the formal complaint to NIST?

https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/group/pqc-forum/at...

I'm hearing he is mostly piggy backing on others work, as from what I'm told he was a quantum skeptic and joined the game late (honestly just repeating informal chats with some people interested in that topic)

I'm not sure how that could be the case. Dan was among the first to push the notion of post-quantum cryptography, along with Johannes Buchmann and his research group at Darmstadt (which credit him in [1] with the coining of the notion of "post-quantum cryptography"). Both organized the first PQCrypto conference in 2006, and edited the first book on post-quantum crypto.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2004/297

Isn't all science "piggy backing on others work"?

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