KernelTrap Interviews William Lee Irwin III

An Anonymous Coward writes: "KernelTrap has posted an interview with kernel hacker William Lee Irwin III (aka "wli"). He is one of the developers helping to implement a reverse mapping feature into the Linux kernel. (Rik van Riel, the lead of this effort, was interviewed by KernelTrap earlier.) From the interview: 'For regular kernel hacking, rewrites aren't going to get anywhere, those who wrote the originals will scream bloody murder and those who have to call the stuff are terrified they'll have to deal with new bugs in unfamiliar code. But as a crutch for getting around not quite being able to read things it's fine. Maybe someone will come after me for saying so as there are bound to be frivolous rewrites of all kinds of things after any kind of public statement like this, but if people get off their butts and stop duplicating everyone else's merges of $VM + O(1) + misc garbage to write some actual new code, it's worth the flames.'"

wli my man.

[sinserve]

This guy is just a plain genius. I have ran into him a while back, when I was
learning lisp, and found him on #lisp (openprojects irc network.)

We chatted for a while about everything I knew about computing (i never sat in a
CS class, I am a business undergrad, but I am a linguistics and compiler construction
fanatic.)

This guy was one of the few people I spoke to in person (well, IRC) who knew about
what they were talking about.
The conversation is still blurry to me, but I am remember it went from symbolic computing->
regular languages -> grammars -> regular expressions -> ... -> code generation -> chicks.

WLI, if you are reading this, a BIG hi from a guy you spoke to, 1.5 years ago.

P.S. I couldn't master mercury, I was side tracked by O'Caml ;-D

Re:wli my man.

[wli]

Glad to be of service.

Cheers,
Bill