Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: scriptingNews outline for 4/22/2000

Author:Kendall
Posted:4/22/2000; 3:50:41 PM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 4/22/2000
Msg #:16555 (In response to 16537)
Prev/Next:16554 / 16556

I think that ESR is very overrated as a thinker (I don't really care about if he's as good a hacker as most people seem to think). He's certainly not in Richard Stallman's league either as a thinker or hacker, though most people think of him in that league (hence my use of 'overrated'.)

But, Dave, just so you know, ESR's fetchmail is a seriously good piece of code, used on millions of boxes to transfer mail, and it's definitely state of the art for Unix. It also has, IIRC, at least one very cool trick that no one had really done before. Point here is that it's the kind of high-quality C code around which Unix is built. I've been using it non-stop for at least 3 years, and it's never lost a *single* piece of my mail (and I get upwards of 15,000 pieces a month).

You did say 'mostly', so I'm just trying to point out which piece isn't either a script or a weekend hack. My point isn't that fetchmail *alone* justifies his reputation as a hacker. But he's also not what you'd fairly call a lightweight.

Kendall

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