[gnufied]

On anonymous programmers, I respect this guy - Icefrog. Lead designer of Dota2, long time maintainer of Dota1 (And the one who really brought the game to the fore), he even works for Valve but nobody knows who he really is.

To certain extent I think remaining anonymous forces you to be humble, which I think can be a good thing, but damn people want to put a name to everything.

EDIT: I suspect some people at Valve will at least know who he really is.

[lmm]

Humble is not a word I'd use to describe this stunt. If _why and their readers are having fun then fair play to them, but this is putting more attention on the person and less on what they've done, whereas the truly humble would want the reverse.

[vidarh]

Part of the the issue for _why seems to be that he got extremely disillusioned about criticism of his code; criticism he took to heart (in this book he also very explicitly say "I wrote hideous code for years"). So putting more attention on a persona that is thoroughly his own creation, and away from his code, seems to me like he is dismissing the worth of his coding.

In fact, I find it quite sad to see how he refers to his code - I admire a lot of what he did. Sure, a lot of it was not great engineering, but it was artful. E.g. Camping is fantastic to read, both for itself and as a sort of practical demonstration of how bloated many frameworks are. It's not that most people would ever have a good reason to use Camping as their web framework, but that to me is besides the point.

That said, part of it this whole thing also does seem to be driven by (hurt) pride.

I hope he sticks with the writing, though - so far I'm halfway through the PDF, and I love it.

[doki_pen]

This is what he's done though. I think that he'd like to be more than a programmer.

[oblio]

About Icefrog - I can't really say anything about his programming skills - I think he must be decent since he optimized the JASS scripts used by the Warcraft 3 engine and he also created tons of fun stuff using it. As a comparison, his predecessor, Guinsoo, had created a map with a 10 minute loading time (!). In Icefrog's reign I don't think any map had a loading time above 1-2 minutes on a decent computer.

Anyway, getting back to the topic - I don't know about his strength as a programmer, but I think we could all learn from him as a community leader. Anonymous leader, rallied a lot of people around him (a few other coders, a lot of testers, a TON of contributors), gave Dota a rhythm, a release flow that made Dota huge. You'd play the game knowing that game crashing bugs would be fixed ASAP, that game play balance issues would be resolved, that the next version would make everything just BETTER.

A ton of dedication and hard work didn't hurt either :)