Drinkable Chicken

This sounds familiar:

“What I found shocking was that there are now “cool programmers”, who are cool not because of awesome code, but by virtue of showmanship and relentless self-promotion. It’s like the cool kids in High School. Blogging and twittering has become a way to strike a pose and market yourself.”

Indeed, there are several reasons why you might know a certain programmer by name.  Blogging has a lot to do with that, to the point where you know certainly people *exclusively* because they blog (and/or write books), not because you use their software. How many people would know who Paul Graham is if it wasn’t for his essays? Ditto for e.g. Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, Steve Yegge, Eric Raymond, etc. That is not to say that these people aren’t competent programmers, or that they haven’t achieved anything; but their writings are *much* more popular than their other work.

On the other hand, there are programmers who don’t blog much (or at all), but whose names are well-known anyway. Language designers come to mind, for example (do the names Guido, Larry or Matz ring a bell?), but also developers of popular projects. They don’t even have to be the main developer; for instance, Martin von Löwis is well-known in the Python community, not because he blogs about controversial topics, but because of his relentless contributions to the development of Python. And there are many others.

There are also those in the middle; Richard Stallman perhaps, who is well known because of the Free Software movement, the GPL, and his unyielding stance on proprietary-vs-free software, among other things; but also because he is a prolific coder, and his GNU tools are all over the place. (Although I’m not sure how much of it is of his hand, nowadays.)