alt Hacker News"He is almost certainly a better overall programmer than I am."
Hedging the claim with a lot of qualifiers. What's wrong with admitting someone is a better programmer? even giving someone else the benefit of the doubt?
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Programmers are notoriously nitpicky, and avoid making absolute statements in most cases (wait, I'm doing it too!).
This is because we've been trained to be humble by the machines we work with. Computers expose a lot of our mistakes, and over time they remove any illusion that we can be quickly confident about things.
I would take the qualifiers in his post as an indication of his general disinclination towards making absolute statements, not as a lack of humility.
I suspect being a "better programmer" cannot be said unequivocally at their level. At that percentile of achievement, it depends on the specific dimension you are talking about. It's true of the highest skill in any field.
True, it's a weird thing to say. I am in no position to rank them, I assume they are both excellent at their niches (granted bellard seems to be interested in a lot of niches) but it never hurt anybody to be humble in this position.
It's just a tweet, no need to over-analyze everything.
Depends on what we mean by programmer.
Fabrice is more clever and faster, I guess.
But John Carmack is in my mind a better software engineer. He writes elegant code that can be used and maintained for a long time. At least from Quake 2ish, but you can see signs of solid code architecture already in Doom.
Doom code will live almost as-is forever. The code Fabrice wrote for ffmpeg has been entirely replaced
Carmack might think that there are certain areas he will be better due to decades of experience. Overall programmer isn’t a bad qualifier at all, it’s actually making it sound less offhand and more honest.
Carmack seems arrogant[1]. Which is why I take that statement as high praise.
It’s also a nod to his own fame.
[1] This is based on Masters of Doom. And the anecdotes are probably from the 90’s. And being arrogant does not mean that being confident in one’s ability is unjustified or that they are in fact not skilled. Being arrogant and being highly skilled are completely orthogonal.
You’re not the only one who noticed. I think the unspoken idea is that Carmack thinks he’s better without ever having met him or seen his code at all. That deserves a few qualifiers.
He says that Bellard is a better overall programmer, and for some reason you take this as evidence of a lack of humility?