

Does Donald Knuth reads your blog too? - radious
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2386

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zephyrfalcon
"Received in email from Donald Knuth’s secretary:"

Doesn't this mean that the secretary reads the blog? :-)

~~~
tincholio
I guess you're joking, but just in case... Knuth hasn't used email for years.
<http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html>

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joubert
how the hell do you get to the blog's top? I can only browse forward/backward
through articles and the top right images link elsewhere.

one would think the top left heading would be a hyperlink most current article
or something.

~~~
bingaman
Big blue text in the upper left corner that's not a link - BAD!

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statictype
Nothing on his blog seems to indicate any 'real important stuff'. Is he
getting trolled?

~~~
jewbacca
He's Eric S. Raymond (widely known as ESR)[1], a major contributor to and
early public advocate of the open-source community[2], originator and
maintainer of much enduring 80s and 90s hacker humour[3], sometimes shit-
disturber[4], and libertarian borderline crank[5].

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond>

[2] <http://catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/cathedral-bazaar/>

[3] <http://catb.org/jargon/>

[4] <http://catb.org/~esr/halloween/>

[5] ...not really, he's far more balanced than RMS. He's a guns-and-crypto
nut, and defends his position well.

\---

That he's so starstruck by contact with Knuth surprises me -- occupying, as
they do for me, roughly equal mindshare in the category of "old-school
computer celebrities", I figured they'd just know each-other. I guess I don't
really have any model of intra-celebrity social diffusion, and that category
needs to be more granular.

~~~
statictype
Oh, I know who he is. I occasionally peep at his blog in the way one would
glance at a train-wreck before passing along.

And I don't see anything in his recent posts that would lead Knuth to conclude
that he's 'doing lots of real important stuff'. The language alone sounds odd.

I still think its possible that someone is just trolling him - and certainly
while he seems starstruck to receive a mail from Knuth's secretary - he's
boasted before about receiving emails from Knuth.

~~~
jewbacca
Well specifically, he's the maintainer of INTERCAL[1], an esoteric/outright
evil programming language that, from his request (if I'm not being too
credulous; it's at least plausible), Knuth must find amusing. Of course he's
not a Computer Scientist on the level of Knuth, but my awareness of him, at
least, is as an important cultural figure in computer-aware politics (from
back when this was a distinguishable perspective), and a curator of a
significant chunk of the culture of hackers from a formative era, which they
were both a part of, that might otherwise be left abandoned. I'd hesitate to
frame him as appreciable as a philosopher to Knuth's scientist, because he's a
hacker who's also made real contributions to code that is still in use today;
but his essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar'[2], at the very least, was an
important text in laying down, and communicating to those who may not have
previously understood, an open source philosophy that we take as a given
position today.

I dunno, I'm just surprised to see the lack of recognition apparent in a
thread on Hacker News about someone who I think of as a notably important
figure, a hacker elder. I'm not from that era, maybe I just read too much
Slashdot back in the day.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL>

[2] [http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-
bazaar/cathedral...](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-
bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/)

~~~
mukyu
I don't think anyone in this thread does not know who esr is.

However, the email implies that esr is currently busy doing important things.

esr hasn't done anything important in a decade. [1]

This is the disconnect--that people do not know of anything that esr is
_currently doing_ not that they do not _know who esr is_.

[1] Actually, TAOUP was published in 2003 so seven years, but it is still ages
in this field.

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kunley
I like ESR's idea of having semi-random cites at the top of each blog entry.

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peterwwillis
the comments are great, especially the 'full of shit' and jessica's.

