
Jon Skeet: The 'Chuck Norris' of Programming (2016) - air7
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-34596634
======
ropman76
After all this time the joke “Jon Skeet has already written a book about C#
5.0.

It’s currently sealed up.

In three years, Anders Hejlsberg is going to open the book to see if the
language design team got it right.” still cracks me up.

~~~
qes
C# v5 was released in 2012..

~~~
war1025
He said "after all this time", so it is probably a rather old joke.

------
chx
The article mentions Sara Chipps introducing Skeet to StackOverflow, an
exceptional woman who eventually became the Director of Public Q&A at
StackOverflow. She also founded Girl Develop It and made Jewelbots and is on
the board of the .Net foundation.

~~~
chooseaname
I'm curious why this is down voted[0] as nobody who did actually replied. Is
the information inaccurate? I don't know who she is, is she a controversial
figure?

[0] At the time I'm replying...

~~~
gpvos
The comment was only a few minutes old, so the downvotes may not have been
representative of the HN population yet. It looks fine as of this moment.
Reacting too fast on something being downvoted is often unnecessary, and
distracts from the original point, so I often downvote such reactions.

------
mellosouls
At the risk of being downvoted to hell (I'm at peace with my non-entity
status, honest), I admire Skeet but find the slavish adoration of him on
Stackoverflow quite irritating at times. This reflects both in some of the
more unctuous comments and immediate massive upvoting of his answers.

It's not him, it's the circus that has developed from admirable community
support and respect for a formidable person to something that must be a little
frustrating for some of the other rockstars of the site who live in his shadow
(and maybe for him as well!) - though I expect this multiplier effect also
positively benefits them as well in comparison to the people further down the
ladder.

Or am I imagining it?

~~~
wool_gather
No, you're absolutely right. Only an anecdote, but I once posted an answer at
the same time as him; his was somewhat wrong or at least misleading, but got
an immediate upvote anyways. I commented, pointing out the problem, and he
fixed it -- which is fine! -- and ended up with more upvotes and the green
checkmark. Meanwhile my answer that had said the correct thing from the
beginning sat at 0.

In the grand scheme of things it's a non-issue, but it was quite frustrating
at the time. And it is clearly an example driven by him as a famous
personality rather than technical chops.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I’ve heard him say he will often post a brief reply to get to the head of the
queue then come back later to round it out.

------
chooseaname
Ok, so I'm going to ask a controversial question. It's not for lack of respect
for Mr Skeet, but is he really one of the greats? When I think of great
programmers I think Ken Thompson, John Carmack, etc. Mr Skeet is, no doubt, a
fount of knowledge, but does that make you a great programmer?

~~~
mellosouls
I think his importance as a "pillar of the community", in addition to his
great expertise and breakout fame entitles him to being considered one of the
greats, and inspirational to us little guys.

Perhaps a longer timeframe will change that, but at the moment it seems ok to
me.

It helps that he seems like a good egg.

------
dejawu
I thought Jeff Dean was the Chuck Norris of programming?

[https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-
facts](https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-facts)

~~~
zpallin
Exactly. How's someone gonna be claimed the "Chuck Norris" of something
without a continuous stream of references to impossible feats?

~~~
Noumenon72
Are you aware of [https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-
fact...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts) ?

* Jon Skeet can divide by zero.

* Jon Skeet's SO reputation is only as modest as it is because of integer overflow (SQL Server does not have a datatype large enough)

* Jon Skeet is the only top 100 SO user who is human. The others are bots that he coded to pass the time between questions.

* Jon Skeet coded his last project entirely in Microsoft Paint, just for the challenge.

* Jon Skeet can solve the travelling salesman in O(1).

* Jon Skeet does not use exceptions when programming. He has not been able to identify any of his code that is not exceptional.

* When you search for "guru" on Google it says "Did you mean Jon Skeet?"

* Jon Skeet can recite π. Backwards.

* Jon Skeet is the traveling salesman. Only he knows the shortest route.

* Jon Skeet can make the Kessel run in under twelve parsecs.

* If Jon Skeet posts a duplicate question on StackOverflow, the original question will be closed as a duplicate.

* When Jon gives a method an argument, the method loses

* When Jon pushes a value onto a stack, it stays pushed

* When invoking one of Jon's callbacks, the runtime adds "please"

* Google is Jon Skeet behind a proxy.

* The Jon Skeet badge is awarded for posting a better answer than Jon Skeet. Only Jon Skeet can earn this badge.

* God said: 'Let there be light,' only so he could see what Jon Skeet was up to.

* Jon Skeet doesn't use #include. He thinks of it as cheating.

* When Jon Skeet throws an exception, nothing can catch it.

* .NET uses Just-In-Time compilation because every instruction must first be approved by Jon Skeet.

* nVidia plans to triple the processing power of their newest videocards by bypassing their GPU pipelines entirely and offloading the vector operations to Jon Skeet over instant messenger. And those graphics benchmarks will improve further still during those intervals when Jon is actually awake.

* Any function written by Jon Skeet can only return 42. Co-workers have yet to report any errors caused by this.

* Jon Skeet programs in Binary, then compiles it into human-readable code.

* Jon Skeet has 2 keyboards so that he can type at full speed on one while the other is cooling down.

* Jon Skeet's desktop background is a picture of his desktop background. You wouldn't understand it even if you saw it.

* Jon Skeet's keyboard has only two buttons: 1 and 0

\--Only one key surely, pressed (1) and released (0), and input is done at a
fixed frequency (a la serial comms)

\----last heard.. he got rid of that key too.. It's amazing what Jon Skeet can
do with reflection and blinking.

* Jon Skeet's development workstation does not have a monitor. He never saw the point. In fact, the only reason he installed a video card is because the BIOS beep warning irritated his cat.

* Jon Skeet can appreciate music by opening an MP3 in a hex editor and reading it. He doesn't need a monitor for that either.

* When dragons write code they comment it with "Here be Jon Skeet".

* Alan Turing is Skeet-Complete.

* There are 10 types of people in this world. Those who think they understand binary, and Jon Skeet.

* I opened up a can of awesome the other day - it had Jon Skeet in it.

* The only reason we didn't all die of the Y2K bug was because Jon Skeet was bored on New Year's Eve and decided to fix it.

* Chuck Norris and Jon Skeet walked into a bar. The bar was instantly destroyed, as that level of awesome cannot be contained in one building.

\-- ...Jon Skeet walked out unharmed.

* Jon Skeet can speak French in Russian.

* Jon Skeet can make IE obey his CSS rules.

------
pvaldes
Three nice bengal cats?... now we know who really programs in that house

~~~
zafka
My wife and I adopted a Bengal from a coworker who took it in, when original
owners moved and could not keep it. It turned out he was allergic. Anyhow, we
tried for several months, but the Bengal would stalk and attack all of our
other cats, completely terrorizing them. It was a beautiful cat, and super
friendly to humans, but we had to find her a home where she was the only cat.

~~~
pvaldes
yup, aggression is common two strange adult cats meet, not to mention when the
new cat talks in a different dialect like bengals do.

With five cats, he will need six computers at least. I wonder if bengals are
so warm lovers as the common african domestic cat.

------
godelmachine
Mandatory follow up reading -

[https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-
fact...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts)

[https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/01/15/thanks-million-jon-
ske...](https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/01/15/thanks-million-jon-skeet/)

------
habosa
Whenever I tell other people at Google that John Skeet works at Google and is
the same level that they are, it triggers immediate impostor syndrome.

------
qes
Chuck Norris of writing StackOverflow answers.

What notable code has he written?

~~~
jameshart
Assuming you're genuinely curious, some of Jon Skeet's achievements for which
he has not received any SO karma include:

Noda Time -
[https://github.com/nodatime/nodatime/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/nodatime/nodatime/graphs/contributors)
The C# Protobuf port - [https://github.com/jskeet/protobuf-csharp-
port/graphs/contri...](https://github.com/jskeet/protobuf-csharp-
port/graphs/contributors)

Noda time is one of the top 100 downloaded packages on nuget.

That's quite a significant contribution to the .NET open source ecosystem -
especially for someone whose day job is programming Java at Google, so these
are pure side projects (.

He also wrote _C# In Depth_ which is one of the standards by which programming
language books should be judged (up with books like K&R, JavaScript: The Good
Parts, and Essential Java).

~~~
qes
I'm not curious; I'm already aware.

NodaTime is a port. He didn't come up with those ideas. He translated Java
code to C#. protobuf isn't much different, either.

------
trollied
His SO profile: [https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-
skeet](https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet)

------
lazycrazyowl
What about Jeff Dean ?

[https://www.mercurynews.com/2013/01/24/how-googles-jeff-
dean...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2013/01/24/how-googles-jeff-dean-became-
the-chuck-norris-of-the-internet/amp/)

------
mark-r
Discussion from when it was posted here in 2016:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11415705](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11415705)

------
xurias
Meh

~~~
codingdave
> Maybe we'd find out who the real greatest programmers are.

I don't think there is such a thing. Certainly there are well-known coders who
are terrific. But there are also great coders quietly working away in mundane
jobs, doing great work, without any fanfare. And we have a huge variety of
work in the industry. A great programmer in one area won't be a great in
another. And that isn't even getting into the philosophical discussion of
academic coders vs. pragmatic.

At the end of the day, any list of the best coders is going to be built upon
opinionated criteria. Maybe instead of discussing an artificial list, just go
out and say "Thanks", to any great coders who you work with.

------
kebman
So he's the Chuck Norris of programming. Then who's the Batman of Stack
Overflow? :D

~~~
macpete
Joel Spolsky?

