I learned some at the university, but I learned much more by doing. In my opinion, programmer is a very lonely profession. To be a really great programmer, talk less and live in the tedium of 1000s of small details. Programming is a creative art, but it is very tedious and requires very long periods of delayed gratification. I am extrovert, but I also love to design, so I guess I sacrifice for the thrill of the result. Well at least I used to, so I need to go back into my cave now. Btw, programming the way I do it (disappearing) is incompatible with relationship. Some others perhaps are able to carry out programming in a more socially interactive methodology, but I find my productivity goes to 0 when I try to do that, because my extrovert side takes over. For example, Eric S. Raymond appears to have a high enough bandwidth to code at a high productivity while simultaneously very social.
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Dude his code is every browser, mobile phone, and desktop computer on the planet. Some people are very efficient, which is another sign of genius.
I don't know what ESR does for a living, but in the open source world he's not very productive, to say the very least. Unlike most other big names (like, say, Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, or more recently Satoshi Nakamoto) he's mostly known for his writing essays and not code.
Now really? So please point me to his major contributions to browsers, phones etc. Or, if you want to refute what I said, to an open source project where he is a major contributor.
I knew beforehand only about fetchmail and bogofilter (I'd used both), Wikipedia also says that he contributed code and content to BoW. Not very much, but feel free to substantiate your claim quoted above. I am always happy to admit error in face of evidence ;)
You are consuming my time, forcing me to refute your ignorance because you come here and attack my reputation. That is what I consider to be rude. You come off as an academic who is offended that anyone other than your fellow academics might have a theory and opinion on anything in your claimed area of expertise.
His GIF code for example is in use in all those cases. His GPS code is in use in nearly every mobile device, including the military. Now he is working on the very important problem of rescuing important large historic code bases from archaic version control systems. Man please...