Dave Plummer

And the other is code gets into a state that the developers didn't anticipate or didn't test very well.

And maybe that's a rare state, but now that Notepad or Word or Excel is in that state, your system is goofy.

So if you just reboot the thing or shut it down or restart it, you're getting a fresh state and there's no memory leaks.

So it covers a lot of sins, basically.

In terms of beautiful code, there's two that stand out for me.

One is the kernel in general.

When you get down into the Windows kernel in the actual NT APIs and stuff, it's very well written.

And it's written to a standard that you don't see on the user side, or at least is uncommon on the user side.

On the user side, probably the coolest code I remember seeing was a guy named Bob Day wrote a named pipe implementation to eliminate the use of shared memory.

So Windows 95 had a big shared segment amongst all the shell processes where it would store stuff that was common to all the shells.

We didn't want to do that.

Shared memory is a bad idea on an anti-internet industrial level.

So he came up with a way to do it with named pipes.

And I remember doing the code review on it.

Then it was...

Very impressive to walk through the code.

It was one of those things that was like, oh, I don't think I could have done that if I was trying.

You know what?

I don't think there is anyone.

I've met a number of great programmers, but I'll tell you one story that impressed me a lot was when I was brand new at the company.