Salon.com > Rachel Chalmers

GOTO considered joyful

Wed, 09 Jul 2003 19:30:00 +0000

considered harmful: adj. [very common] Edsger W. Dijkstra's note in the March 1968 "Communications of the ACM," "Goto Statement Considered Harmful," fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars ... use of such titles has remained as a persistent minor in-joke (the 'considered silly' found at various places in this lexicon is related).

That entry in Eric Raymond's edition of the Hacker's Dictionary was my first encounter with pioneering computer scientist Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, but thanks to the dedicated work of volunteers at the University of Texas at Austin, it was very far from my last. These volunteers maintain the massive and growing EWD archive. It's a tremendous and erudite proto-blog, the extraordinary record of an exemplary life, and it's one of my favorite places on the Web. A year after his death, a computer scientist who devoted himself to teaching people how to think is still on the podium, delivering gem after gem of insight.

Guru of the Unix gurus

Fri, 01 Sep 2000 19:26:00 +0000

When Andrew Hume presented the Usenix Lifetime Achievement Award in San Diego in June, he managed to say exactly two words -- "Richard Stevens" -- before a standing ovation drowned him out. "I sat next to Richard's family at the presentation," says Tom Christiansen, a well-known figure in the Perl programming community who had known Stevens on and off for years. "It was stunning. I don't know if his family did, but I sure noticed a lot of the audience in tears."

"Usenix," (a word coined to get around trademark restrictions on the word "Unix") is the Advanced Computing Systems Association. W. Richard Stevens is the author of "TCP/IP Illustrated" and "Unix Network Programming," each of which runs to three volumes, and "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment." Their influence among Unix users is hard to overstate. Thousands of programmers all over the world consider Stevens a guru and his works essential to their jobs.

"It blew my mind," says his sister, Claire Stevens. "I knew he wrote those books, but it never made a dent. I had absolutely no idea that all these people knew and were touched by him." Claire and Richard's wife, Sally, accepted the award on Stevens' behalf. Stevens died on Sept. 1, 1999. He was 48 years old.

Even better than Slashdot?

Tue, 18 Jul 2000 19:31:00 +0000

12 July 2000

"Incidentally, Napster was Shawn Fanning's nickname in high school, after he got an extremely short haircut. Just in case, y'know, anyone was still wondering about that."

"rachel"

Let me say, right upfront, that I don't deserve to be on Advogato, and that all the people who have certified me as an "apprentice" are just being kind. (Thanks, people!) I use MacOS at home, Windows (gasp) at work and Linux only occasionally. My sole qualification for membership in the open-source community is that I enjoy the company of engineers very much, and seem to get on with them fairly well. It is, therefore, the height of cheek for me to keep a diary on Advogato, but I do.

Advogato -- it's a play on the word advocate, but the place is routinely called avocado or guacamole -- is an eight-month-old Web site designed to make life a little easier and more fun for free-software developers. It is both a community hangout where hackers cluster, jotting down daily tidbits of info in publicly accessible diaries, and a forum for discussion, like Slashdot. There's also an extra twist: On Slashdot, readers can rate the value of posts as part of a not-always-perfect filtering mechanism. But at Advogato, people rate one another.

The unknown hackers

Wed, 17 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000

Not many Linux-come-latelies know this, but Linux was actually the second open-source Unix-based operating system for personal computers to be distributed over the Internet. The first was 386BSD, which was put together by an extraordinary couple named Bill and Lynne Jolitz. In a 1993 interview with Meta magazine, Linus Torvalds himself name-checked their O.S. "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux," he said, "Linux would probably never have happened."

Linux obviously did happen. Why? Eric Raymond, the open-source evangelist, believes it came down to a question of personal style. In his A Brief History of Hackerdom he praises 386BSD at the expense of the "crude" versions of Linux that were around at the time.

The deciding factor, argues Raymond, was not technological but social. Torvalds, even while practicing rigorous quality control in determining what goes into the Linux kernel and what stays out, nevertheless welcomes contributions and is remarkably generous in sharing credit.

Code critic

Tue, 30 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Before there was an Open Source Initiative, before the Free Software Foundation was even a twinkle in St. iGNUcius' eye, Unix hackers were fighting lawyers and commercial interests for the right to copy and distribute source code. The fight began, in part, due to the beliefs of an avuncular Australian professor named John Lions, who thought that by making source code available and using it as a teaching tool, he could encourage the highest possible standards in programming. As the first anniversary of his death approaches and the open-source movement kicks into higher and higher gear, it seems a propitious time to remember Lions' contribution.

I stumbled across Lions' books in 1996. I'd majored in literature and seemed to have spent my entire life searching for a witty, literate man. When I finally found the man who would become my fianci, he was a Unix hacker. This baffled me. I couldn't begin to imagine how the arid world of over-lit computer labs and humming server rooms could have produced someone so much droller and more insightful than my fellow humanities graduates. So I did what I always do when I want to get inside someone's head: I browsed his bookshelves.