
Ask HN: How good a programmer is Eric S. Raymond? - DC-3
As far as I can ascertain, Eric S. Raymond is considered by many to be a statesmanlike figure in Unix culture, to be uttered in the same breath as Linus, Richard Stallman, Ken Thompson, and Dennis Ritchie. Yet while all these figures have groundbreaking software (Linux, Emacs, Unix, C) to their name, Raymond has effectively no notable software to his name at all.<p>I understand the influence of CatB - but is there evidence to suggest that ESR is genuinely an excellent programmer, or is he simply a mediocre developer with a skill for spinning a yarn?
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greenyoda
Here's a list of the software he's written or worked on:

[http://www.catb.org/esr/software.html](http://www.catb.org/esr/software.html)

For example, he wrote the 'giflib' library, which is used by a lot of software
(browsers, etc.) to handle GIF files. And he's contributed to several Python
libraries. So it seems he's quite an accomplished programmer.

