NewsForge: 2.4 kernel: Always on the go with contributor Werner Almesberger

“Swiss born Austrian, Werner Almesberger first tried Linux in
January of 1992. Linus Torvalds had just released version 0.12.
Almesberger had liked it before but he “didn’t want to buy Minix to
run it.” Gradually, Linux took center stage. Now Almesberger jokes
that I’ve come to him because the “patch a day” principle he’s
adopted “seems to be good for drawing attention.” (That pace only
lasted for about two weeks.)”

“Awarded his Ph.D. in communications from the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL) in November 1999, his
name is more descriptive of him when preceded by the title of “Dr.”
Sure, a doctorate is not such an anomaly among prestigious
programmers, but when he mentions the clubbing till the break of
dawn “or longer” that he likes to do, contrast makes things more
interesting. Both activities are intense, but the dancing till dawn
gives a classic vocation a private edge which is amplified when you
enter his homepage this way. He also likes to drive fast, ski
downhill and bring work home with him, at least the part that has
to do with Linux….”

“One of the nicer things I did was combine my impressions from
Pascal and a bit of C into my own programming language design, and
to build a compiler for it. My compiler generated even faster code
than Turbo Pascal, which was pretty much the state of the art back
then (’86 or ’87). Obviously, I didn’t really understand C the way
I do today, or I would have realized that it’s already almost
perfect. ;-)”

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