
Ask HN: Who is your programming (ideally open source) guru / role model? - zajkowskimarcin
I&#x27;m preparing a talk about open source and general contribution to software (in terms of development). How it may help us to get a better job, become a better person or just feel good in terms of self-realisation.<p>I&#x27;ve asked about it my followers on [Twitter] (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;zajkowskimarcin&#x2F;status&#x2F;974203034216665089) and I noticed that people are either not having their coding &#x27;gurus&#x27; or are not admitting &#x2F; sharing info about them.<p>So...<p>Who is yours #opensource (and maybe not only) guru &#x2F; inspiration &#x2F; authority &#x2F; role model? Do you have one? Do you find inspiration in someone else&#x27;s code?<p>I&#x27;m gathering GOOD (and also BAD - feel free to share both) examples of companies and people in the #oss movement for my talk. But here, maybe go one step beyond open source and let&#x27;s speak about general peogramming and programmers.<p>Any help appreciated. Looking for an amazing discussion and some more inspirational and like-minded people to follow and learn about their life stories.
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zer00eyz
I'm going to give an answer that some people won't like, and to be honest I
don't like either:

Richard Stallman.

I no longer care about the "super coder" or the "smart dude" or the "rock
star" because it doesn't really matter. Good and bad coders are both capable
of getting things done.

Stallman is, for lack of a better word, a zealot. For as much as that may be
off putting at times, he really isn't wrong. Closed source and closed design,
starting at the hardware layer, has bitten us rather badly in recent days.
This isn't the first time, it won't be the last, and until we collectively
demand more it simply won't change.

There are other people who I have deep respect for and look up to, Bunnie
Huang and Salvatore Sanfilippo spring to mind as people I keep an eye on there
are more but those are off the top of my head.

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open-source-ux
I greatly admire Niklaus Wirth (although not as a guru or role model as such).

Wirth created Pascal, then Modula-2 and then Oberon. He's 84 and has a career
that stretches back to Algol in the 1960s. He has gained enormous insight into
the design of programming languages and compilers.

He has always strived for simplicity in compiler and language design, but
without sacrificing power and expressiveness. When he created Oberon, he
created a language specification that was a mere 16 pages! That language was
then used to build an entire operating system.

He lamented over 20 years ago that as hardware gets faster, software gets
slower. A statement that still rings true today for many programs.

Anything Wirth writes or speaks about is worth reading (even if you find much
to disagree). But is anyone listening to what he has to say?

 _" The wealth of features of many languages is indeed a problem rather than a
solution. A multitude of features is another consequence of the programmers'
belief that the value of a language is proportional to the quantity of its
features and facilities, bells and whistles.

However, we know that it is better if each basic concept is represented by a
single, designated language construct. Not only does this reduce the effort of
learning, but it reduces the volume of the language's description and thereby
the possibilities of inconsistency and of misunderstanding.

Keeping a language as simple and as regular as possible has always been a
guideline in my work; the description of Pascal took some 50 pages, that of
Modula 40, and Oberon's a mere 16 pages. This I still consider to have been
genuine progress."_

From a 1997 interview:
[http://www.eptacom.net/pubblicazioni/pub_eng/wirth.html](http://www.eptacom.net/pubblicazioni/pub_eng/wirth.html)

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ioddly
Fabrice Bellard: [https://bellard.org](https://bellard.org)

No social media. Just shows up every year or two with something that would be
a decade-long project for most people.

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DamnYuppie
Those who have most impacted my development are the creator of Ruby on Rails
David Heinemeier Hansson and John Resig who started the JQuery library.

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Nomentatus
Several - those who've tackled the business model problem with at least some
innovative success. Starting with the MySQL guy.

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zajkowskimarcin
Nice one! I forgot about Michael Widenius. Any more names or pointers? Feel
free to share more of them. Thanks in advance.

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quantummkv
There is Matt Mullenweg, responsible for powering about a quarter of the
internet with Wordpress.

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valeg
Linus Torvalds, he's a doer.

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KyleMarMc
Julia Evans - [https://jvns.ca/](https://jvns.ca/).

She is fantastic at unpicking supposedly "hard" technical subjects in order to
better understand them, which is one of the marks of a hacker. Not only that,
she is great at communicating those subjects to others. In that respect, she
is indeed inspirational - she inspires that level of inquisitiveness and deep
stack knowledge.

