lmao.

When I finally met Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick in person?

And I learned that he had wanted to write his doctoral dissertation on something more related to the BSD stuff he had been working on (e.g. the BSD TCP/IP stack) as a grad student, but instead was told that doctoral thesis stuff needed to be more 'theoretical'. So I guess he ended up writing something about MC68000 register optimizations? He made some offhand remark about "probably only six people read it." I heard that and was like, "wait a second, that sounds familiar." I later looked up the doctoral thesis and was like, "oh yeah, I definitely read this decades ago when I was trying to improve my MC68k asm skillz".

So humbling.

Also, apparently I am a huge nerd. Just, not one with any renown or impact on the level of McKusick.

The exasperated sighs I exhale when I encounter some really promising code, that is totally PhD "research grade" and full of Linuxisms is a bane of my existence! I suppose the blow is somewhat softened given that most of them have at least leveled up to Linuxisms from ye olde SunOS and IRIXisms or (pick your $proprietaryOSBSflavorhere) of yesterdecades that I had to trudge through. I have an enormous distaste for academia to the point where I am not sure how to feel when I get cited in others' Masters' and PhD' theses.

Like, I don't want to go through that level of work (I am not a masochist, I only have a B.A.) but I kind of respect the grind for those who have gone that far?

It would probably hurt less if I didn't feel as if a lot of my past efforts were appropriated by postdocs without attribution (and apparently those kinds of abuses are not uncommon within the hierarchies of academia).

But please I thought I had bad skillz with Makefiles! How do you [the "royal" you, not you personally] have published RFCs (PLURAL) and I can't fucking build your code from source on a real UNIX® system?! Why do you hate me/us/the world that much!? Why do I suffer through such things to try to make your code function on something mere mortals might encounter in the real world? Meanwhile, nmap apparently builds on Amigas and Fyodor doesn't even seem to have ever owned an Amiga! Be more like Fyodor! Please PhDs, please! (OK though really how many of us can claim our code has had cameos in multiple movies? nmap is way beyond 1337, no wonder Fyodor has a vibrant volunteer dev community)

CC: @jmc@unix.house @mei@donotsta.re