Ask HN: What are the '7 wonders' of the coding world? - vinnyglennon
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angersock
I'll only go with things you can read the source code of:

 _The Quake 1-3 engines_. Truly groundbreaking for each one, and easily
understandable by mere mortals. They were critical in the adoption of consumer
GPUs and in network gaming. With modding and everything else, they basically
created an entire industry.

 _PostgreSQL_. Amazing RDBMS that has a long history and is also very
approachable by the layman. It sets new records for technical writing as well,
and is in widespread use.

 _Linux_. Hugely important, full of smart and not-smart pieces, and the
backbone of a lot of the computing world today.

 _Plan 9_. Maybe the best version of Unix ever made, and very approachable in
both its system design and implementation. It's a future that never came to
pass, but is hugely interesting.

 _BLAS /LAPACK_. Gigantic and scary piles of optimizations for numerical
linear algebra, but of utterly unmatched importance (barring _maybe_ the FFT).
Everything behind control and data modeling today relies on this.

 _Erlang 's BEAM_. Another very approachable VM, and one that has an amazing
track record. Combined with OTP, this powers a lot of very important telecom
and other systems.

 _MUMPS_. A dark wonder, but almost all healthcare interacts with a MUMPS
runtime at one point or another. A sobering reminder that we as engineers can
do horrible things that will stay in production for decades and maybe even
kill people.

~~~
sigjuice
What do you consider the non-smart pieces of Linux? Thanks!

~~~
angersock
The OOM killer, the graphics and audio stack (arguably a userland problem, but
still), various other things. A lot of the baggage inherited from being Unix-
ish.

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FroshKiller
I don't know about _the_ seven wonders, but I can tell you my personal ones:

    
    
      fast inverse square root
      MP3
      BitTorrent
      Git
      Bitcoin
      AWS
      fast Fourier transform

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dwe3000
I don't know if this follows the spirit of the question, but if I consider a
'wonder' as something that had a major affect on the coding world, wouldn't
some virus/Trojans be applicable? Like the first, whichever that might
technically be, but I'm thinking of the Morris worm [1], though I know it
wasn't the first.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm)

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AnimalMuppet
Well, the 7 wonders of the world were things that you could go _see_. It seems
reasonable to say, then, that the 7 wonders of the coding world have to be
things to which you can see the source code.

I'd nominate a few:

Linux

The Fast Fourier Transform

Lisp (whichever version you like best out of the ones where you can get your
hands on the source)

~~~
cevi
More nominations:

Hashlife (golly)

SAT-solvers (minisat, glucose, lingeling, ...)

Convex optimization (CVXOPT, ...)

------
Saturnaut

      Linux
      SQL
      HTTP
      BitTorrent
      Git
      Blockchain
      Neural Networks

