Hashimoto is an absolute wizard, but what I find most compelling about him is his absolutely uncanny ability to segment and abstract systems and interfaces in a way for maximum composability and minimal entanglement. He's like the walking embodiment of Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy philosophy. It's like he designs software systems in such a way that they have no choice but to operate correctly and predictably.
Also I just tried Ghostty for the first time. With iTerm2 and the Zsh/Powerlevel10k theme, there's an extremely brief but perceptible lag from running a command and the render. In ghostty it feels actually instant.
The nerds would do sooo much better for ourselves if we could build a momentum behind comments like this.
Finding mechanistic (& programmatic) sympathy counts for so so much! Shapes the arch of software so much! But it's such invisible unknown work to most people, not so overtly clear & obvious but something that constantly builds day after day, person after person, incremental 0.2% gains compounded by lack of friction.
As well as just promoting good practioners, it feels like discourse about software architecture has really fallen off. We are deep inside rabbit holes specific to this framework or that, and there's only occasional popping out to free air to bring back some observations from the burrows. Ideally we'd have many more volumes of Architecture of Open Source Applications (2011), for example, to really dive into what is, to give us some common referents to learn from and talk about. https://aosabook.org/en/
This is all so core, so worth getting deep on & looking how things are assembled, what the interfaces and modules and shapes look like, what the tradeoffs were. But it remains chiefly an arcane art, one that most developers much less most businesses haven't developed a refinement or taste for.
I just want to say, what a dream. To have wealth and be able to create projects for the sake of going the projects. To not have to make the concessions of quality for profits.
There's an old Knuth quote:
> In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.
And I think we're seeing more and more that these projects made with love are successful. That without the hyper fixation on money we can build good projects that make big changes in a world.
In some sense I'm a bit envious of Mitchell but truthfully these types of things make me more question how we've constructed our society and economy. It shouldn't require one to start with wealth to be able to build things that have such an impact. What needs to be changed where we can live up to what Knuth proclaimed. I'm sure all of us have had experiences where were we given the time (and usually not much) we could make things so much better. But we make many sacrifices when we rush. Which leads to more good advice by Knuth
> If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.
At what point do we push back? We see that the people we really look up to did things so differently. Knuth himself expressed how detail obsessed he was, and such a claim is common among the grey breads.
Of course, things change, but are we creating a world with no wizards? Are we creating a world where we reward people for solving problems and making our lives easier? Or are we just maximizing some score of a pointless game?
I'd love to live in a world with a thousand more Mitchells, following their passions without the burden of needing to justify decisions to a board who has no interest in quality. How do we create that world?
Like you said, what a legend. But, how do we make more legends?
What we are missing is a sponsorship model that is able to fun this kind of thing. It's not infeasible - look at university grants dispersement as an example of the overwrought predecessor of this. A ton of money moves through such institutions, and funds a lot of interesting projects.
One thing I've been envisioning is something like a "certified B corporation" style qualification that companies can get that indicates they contribute financially back to open source commensurate to the amount of it they consume to run their core business. If everything you do runs through open source software, in a moral sense, one can make the argument that you owe something back to it.
Also, in real life, he's a genuine nice guy. I had lunch with him and Armon at a conference when they worked at Kiip, before they founded Hashicorp. Mitchell (to me) was the proper hacker. He just loved everything about computing. This particular conference was about distributed systems and he was just geeking out on everything.
I walked away thinking that no matter what they did, they'd probably be successful. I was extremely happy to find Ghostty and have been using it ever since.
I had tried it briefly previously but in the last couple months I think I have made the permanent switch from iterm2. It's so much snappier and simpler and also reliably handles text reflowing when a long line wraps, which was a constant problem I had in iterm2, where it would insert fake newlines when copying out text that was wrapped.
I also like that I can have my config in a little plaintext file and just drop it onto a new computer and get the same keybindings. I am using the terminator keybindings for creating and navigating between split panes.
Basically MariaDB. He (original creator of MySQL) sold MySQL for a Billion dollars (iirc) forked it, created MariaDB and kept at it. It's been what 15 years now?
You made me look into HashiCorp again. It's a great company from a developers perspective, in terms of the many useful tools created: Vagrant, Packer, Nomad, Consul, etc
Actually, that's the question (or rather the feeling) I had even before seeing these numbers. Just by reading the docs and looking at everything they built (and how they built it) made me wonder if they spend more than they make. That's a really funny feeling I never had before. Like, surely economies can't be that forgiving when it comes to polishing things. Is that what's happening to the company? Mere overspending?
kortex|5 months ago
Also I just tried Ghostty for the first time. With iTerm2 and the Zsh/Powerlevel10k theme, there's an extremely brief but perceptible lag from running a command and the render. In ghostty it feels actually instant.
jauntywundrkind|5 months ago
Finding mechanistic (& programmatic) sympathy counts for so so much! Shapes the arch of software so much! But it's such invisible unknown work to most people, not so overtly clear & obvious but something that constantly builds day after day, person after person, incremental 0.2% gains compounded by lack of friction.
As well as just promoting good practioners, it feels like discourse about software architecture has really fallen off. We are deep inside rabbit holes specific to this framework or that, and there's only occasional popping out to free air to bring back some observations from the burrows. Ideally we'd have many more volumes of Architecture of Open Source Applications (2011), for example, to really dive into what is, to give us some common referents to learn from and talk about. https://aosabook.org/en/
This is all so core, so worth getting deep on & looking how things are assembled, what the interfaces and modules and shapes look like, what the tradeoffs were. But it remains chiefly an arcane art, one that most developers much less most businesses haven't developed a refinement or taste for.
alostpuppy|5 months ago
ksec|5 months ago
The software world really needs people like him to drive things forward.
hoppp|5 months ago
godelski|5 months ago
There's an old Knuth quote:
And I think we're seeing more and more that these projects made with love are successful. That without the hyper fixation on money we can build good projects that make big changes in a world.In some sense I'm a bit envious of Mitchell but truthfully these types of things make me more question how we've constructed our society and economy. It shouldn't require one to start with wealth to be able to build things that have such an impact. What needs to be changed where we can live up to what Knuth proclaimed. I'm sure all of us have had experiences where were we given the time (and usually not much) we could make things so much better. But we make many sacrifices when we rush. Which leads to more good advice by Knuth
At what point do we push back? We see that the people we really look up to did things so differently. Knuth himself expressed how detail obsessed he was, and such a claim is common among the grey breads. Of course, things change, but are we creating a world with no wizards? Are we creating a world where we reward people for solving problems and making our lives easier? Or are we just maximizing some score of a pointless game?I'd love to live in a world with a thousand more Mitchells, following their passions without the burden of needing to justify decisions to a board who has no interest in quality. How do we create that world?
Like you said, what a legend. But, how do we make more legends?
mikestorrent|5 months ago
One thing I've been envisioning is something like a "certified B corporation" style qualification that companies can get that indicates they contribute financially back to open source commensurate to the amount of it they consume to run their core business. If everything you do runs through open source software, in a moral sense, one can make the argument that you owe something back to it.
nosequel|5 months ago
I walked away thinking that no matter what they did, they'd probably be successful. I was extremely happy to find Ghostty and have been using it ever since.
rwmj|5 months ago
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
buildbot|5 months ago
krferriter|5 months ago
I also like that I can have my config in a little plaintext file and just drop it onto a new computer and get the same keybindings. I am using the terminator keybindings for creating and navigating between split panes.
giancarlostoro|5 months ago
internetter|5 months ago
oblio|5 months ago
However their financials are... LOL
Revenue US$583 million (2024)
Operating income US$−254 million (2024)
50% loss margin :-)))
n4bz0r|5 months ago
Actually, that's the question (or rather the feeling) I had even before seeing these numbers. Just by reading the docs and looking at everything they built (and how they built it) made me wonder if they spend more than they make. That's a really funny feeling I never had before. Like, surely economies can't be that forgiving when it comes to polishing things. Is that what's happening to the company? Mere overspending?
qaq|5 months ago
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
deadbabe|5 months ago
ivanstepanovftw|5 months ago
I cannot imagine what he went through.
Hero.
johnisgood|5 months ago
From the author himself: "My company had an exit, I did well financially. This is not a secret. I'm extremely privileged and thankful for it.".
Honestly, good for him [for doing well financially] and for admitting that he is privileged, and above all, being thankful for it.