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Dobb's Programming Awards
NullPointer
writes "Dr. Dobb's has given their 1999 Excellence in
Programming Awards to Guido Van Rossum and Donald Becker"
Congrats to both of you. For those in the dark, Guido is
our favorite Python god, and Becker is our favorite Linux Ethernet
god (besides fixing my broken laptop X key at ALS :)
Python is mind-bogglingly useful and its source is so clean as to make you cry. Extending it to do supercomputer applications, embedding it into video games, and other exotic uses have all become common for Python.
Take this small test:
Can your language do client and server COM?
Can your language do client and server CORBA?
Can your language be extended and embedded with ease?
Does your language have an amazingly deep library of utility classes?
Does your language have a superbly-civilzed newgroup? (Hi Tim Peters, MA Lemburg, Fredik Lundh, Andrew Kuchling. You guys are awesome)
If you can't claim these things, try python.
Several months ago I tried my hand at writing a driver for the Winbond 840, a very inexpensive 10/100 netcard chipset.
After an embarassingly long time spent trying to debug some rather confusing results from the card, I sent Don an email requesting help.
He asked for my datasheets -- getting them was rather a trick, and he'd had less luck than I -- and had a semi-functional driver done the next day!
A few days after that he _went out and bought his own_ w840-based netcard for debugging purposes. I'm impressed not only with Don's coding skills but his dedication to his work.
MAN, I wish I were a moderator so I could lower your post a notch. Then again, this post deserves the same fate, I suppose.
Yup.
--
I think the problem with Python is that much
of the population is conditioned to loathe snakes.
The Xtians have that Adam&Eve&S@t@n thing to overcome.
People don't have this problem with Coffee, or with Oysters, Monumental French Towers, etc.
"Scheme" and "Guile" might be suffering the same
fate. Don't understimate the power of people's
perceptions to affect a marketplace.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
This may be too obvious, but I'm pretty sure the answers are Perl (as pearls come from oysters) and Eiffel.
Perl's success is very interesting, and nearly completely ignored by other language designers. In my (educated?) opinion, Perl gets a lot of converts because people can sit down, try something, and get it to work a _lot_ quicker than most other languages. There's more than one way to do it, and it's easy to find a style that suits you in Perl. It's practical, rather than built on theoretically pure principles of the Right Way To Do It.
I'm not sure why being practical so often takes a backseat to pushing the agenda of the designers - maybe most people just have a difficult time seeing more than one way things could be done without thinking that one is automatically better.
-- Kate
hi,
How do closed source programmers get evaluated?
Surely these awards could only be given to programmers whose work is open sourced? How else could you evaluate their code?
It's worth making the point that the free software movement has been great for the 'glorifying' of the coder/programmer. The art of programming really enters a new phase if everyone can see your work. This is compounded further if the code is GPL'ed, as anyone who is 'better' than you can fork the project and improve it. Only the best people end up leading projects, no-one is held captive by one vendor - whether that is microsoft or some closed source shareware author whose product you need.
This is a great thing, the best people end up in the best jobs. I hope the free software movement can keep growing as is. (ie: GPL all the way).
It's ironic, that with the GPL you give the code freedom to exist independent of the vendor/coder. But this in turn ends up bringing attention (glory/fame etc) to the programmer if the code is sufficiently good and useful.
At the end of the day, 99% of the best code in the world is going to be GPL'ed, as anything less is a lame attempt to keep some form of control on the code. Whereas the genius programmer has no need for such low self-esteem tactics.
I wonder if Dr Dobb's journal is picking up on these ideas. I don't really see how you could publish a decent programming magazine in a world where everything is closed-source.
ta
wayne