Friend who is not a software person sent me this tweet, which amused me as it did them. They asked if “runk” was real, which I assume not.
But what are some good examples of real ones like this? xz became famous for the hack of course, so i then read a bit about how important this compression algorithm is/was.
Numpy
I nominate Paul Eggert and Arthur Olson before him, for the tz database, which we all depend upon whenever the time at which something happens (or did or will happen) matters.
Edit: Tom Scott touches on the subject here.
The world is built on is-even and is-odd!
Until very recently the whole Resident Evil modding community relied solely on a Maya 3DS script that a Chinese dude named Maliwei777 created in 2012. The community cherished that script but it got harder and harder to get the correct 3DS version to run it.
Sqlite isn’t quite one person, but it is a very small team and is extremely widely used. https://www.sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html
Furthermore, “RUNK” was originally made in the 1980s to take over from a program written on punch cards in the 1960s. Finally, it’s missing some important functions that the original 60s program had because "RUNK"s developer doesn’t see the purpose of those functions and refuses to add them; and no one has publically released a fork of “RUNK” that adds those functions back in, so you have to do it yourself. Thank God it’s open source.
Edit: oh yeah, and back in 2005 there was an effort to make a GUI for it, but “RUNK’s” sole developer got mad because “back in the 80s we didn’t need GUIs; command line is infinitely faster” and kept intentionally breaking support for the GUI with each bug fix, leading to the project eventually being abandoned.
Pretty much every basic terminal command for linux. Grep is the one that comes to mind.
The guy that runs Rufus.
The
core-jsstory always makes me sad. Sure, he’s developing an open source project and no one HAS to pay him. But the meager amount of donations and the tons of hate he receives isn’t justifiable.It’s especially sadder when a substantial amount of the donations vanished when Open Collective and others stopped operating to Russians.
Imagemagick.
Every website that supports avatar images and has multiple sizes of the avatars uses imagemagick.
Another one is OpenSSL.
There is a guy named Arthur David Olson who maintains a small database of all the time zones in the world, including things like leap seconds and such. It’s used by everybody and it is updated several times a year. See here:
If we could all just stop making changes to time zones, that would make my job very slightly easier.
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Is-even and is-odd on npm.
For a while, openssl was maintained by 1 or 2 people.
Is-even 😤
left-pad was the first thing that came to mind for me
