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Comment by statictype | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised this hasn't been submitted before. It's been around for quite some time now.

Regardless of what you think of ESR's personality, politics or hacking skills, I found this to be a pretty good read.

There's lots of good things in here that apply - not just to software written for Unix systems - but for software in general (I guess it's not really a coincidence that a lot of the good practices on Unix are good practices in general).

Edit: Joel Spolsky's take on it: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html

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Regardless of what you think of ESR's personality, politics or hacking skills, I found this to be a pretty good read.

If ESR can write a really good software development book, why do some people thinks ESR can't code a damn?

I haven't found a single mention about him not being a good developer. Do we have any references?

Have you ever seen the fetchmail source code?

My brain is still trying to recover from that particular experience.

Why, what's wrong with it?

http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/faq.html#faq-about-why

http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=585008+0+archiv...

http://www.fetchmail.info/design-notes.html

Didn't he take that over from someone else?

Edit: Yes, it was written by a guy named Carl Harris and ESR took it over when Harris no longer wished to maintain it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetchmail

Well, there's this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=923775

But my point was not so much that he's a bad developer but that his software resume is not as impressive as those he compares himself to.

Well, it's not so much that he can't write code (he can) but more that he markets his hacking skills to an extent greater than what his open source software indicates.

He compares himself to Stallman and Torvalds without having anything nearly as impressive as an OS kernel, C compiler or debugger.

I will say though, that he's good at introspecting on code and articulating points about programs better than most (hence the high quality of the book)

> He compares himself to Stallman and Torvalds without having anything nearly as impressive as an OS kernel, C compiler or debugger.

Does he compare his hacking abilities to Stallman and Torvalds?

My impression is that he considers himself a tribal elder, and compares himself to Stallman and Torvalds in that respect. But that's not quite the same.

I think that's a big part of it right there: people tend to resent self-proclaimed tribal leaders.

I'm pretty sure he has worked on compilers and OS kernels. They just weren't as popular as GCC or Linux. I don't think judging one's programming skill based on the popularity of one's projects is rather fair.

People who can't build excellent software have written many good books.

Writing a good tech book requires deep understanding of a subject.

Writing good software takes discipline, creativity, and (interestingly) not necessarily a particularly deep analytical understanding of underlying concepts. People have written truly excellent software on poor CS foundations.

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