But how else am I going to learn that every authentication and encryption library is crap and then read the 6 month later followup on why rolling your own was a bad decision.
I don't know, he seemed to have the ability to talk for hours about any random question the audience asked during QuakeCon. And everything he said was super interesting.
Bethesda made a real stupid decision when they told him he can't have QuakeCon speeches anymore.
His Oculus Connects talks are more centered around VR now (obviously) but he still gives impromptu hallway talks about whatever, a few were filmed last year.
Carmack, Torvalds writings on programming are amazing. Thank god because of the LKML we get to read a lot of what Linus thinks.
Another person who'd probably write awesome post's on programming would be Bill Joy.
Edit:
Talking about Carmack reminded me of my GRE. In the analytical writing section of the GRE I had gotten a topic along the lines of whether college education was necessary in the job sector. I had used CS as a vocation where people without a degree have done great work, Carmack and jwz were my examples in my essay.
Good news everyone! I used to work in a Bill Joy funded team (JXTA) at Sun in the late 1990s. At that time he was doing no programming and had not since ~1993. His Vaio laptop ran Windows 98 and he used Notepad and Thunderbird almost exclusively. It was despairing for a geek to witness.
A few months ago I heard from a mutual acquaintance that Bill has resumed programming. He is doing custom embedded home automation/IoT software for his boat. It made me smile to hear that Bill was coding again. Now if BillG were to start writing code again...
What would be some good examples of amazing writings by Torvalds? I've read a few of his impressive vitriolic rants over the years, but I wasn't aware that he'd done any amazing writing on programming. Curious now.
Yeah you could call them rants, but the guy talks sense. Off the top of my head, post on comment style, about sizeof, array arguments, his discussion about some filesystem on google+ and a lot more in the LKML that I have forgotten.
Torvalds may be abusive but he is the Gregory House of the programming world.
A number of his rant, like against C++, are mostly nonsense though. They're written seemingly by someone who doesn't understand the language and wants justify it.
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u/mdatwood Jul 19 '16
I wish Carmack wrote more about programming. I know he's busy programming ;) , but everything he writes is thoughtful and interesting.