The great programmer who codes every night until dawn? The father of Python is active at night and the founder of PHP is online 24 hours a day

Li Zi Yu Yang from Aofei Temple
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A great programmer who codes every night until dawn?

A curious person named Ivan Bessarabov ("Ivan" for short) has just counted the code submission (git commit) time distribution of various big guys.

Including the father of Linux, the father of Python, the author of Go language...

Ivan took time zones into consideration and excluded code submitted by multiple people.

The results were very interesting, as several different species were discovered: normal humans, nocturnal animals, and... perpetual motion machines.

This has sparked heated discussions among netizens, with the popularity of the article on Hacker News exceeding 600 points:

Normal human

Normal humans usually work during the day.

However, this species is not common among programmer bosses.

Rob Pike , the author of the Go language, seems like a pretty normal human being:

(The first column is time, the second is lines of code.)

The Go project's repo shows that Rob's working hours are concentrated between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., which is very healthy.

Although he only sleeps 5 hours a day and seems to spend his spare time coding, the organization has determined that he is a normal human being!

The following "normal human" has a different style:

This is from Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux:

Working during the day is fine, but this great coder starts to burst out at 7am, and this momentum lasts almost until 8 or 9pm.

The sleep time is one hour shorter than the person above, not counting the time spent in daze.

This is simply a fighter among normal humans.

According to netizens, Linus may have been forced to become a normal human. Before he had children, he was also a nocturnal creature.

Some people's style is like this:

This is the working time of Fabrice Bellard, the author of FFmpeg, on this project. The later it gets, the happier he is.

What makes people curious is whether this big guy would submit code when inspiration suddenly popped up while he was sleeping...

Nocturnal Beasts

There's no scientific reason for this, but there may have been some mysterious changes in the programmer's body structure.

The proportion of nocturnal creatures among them seems to be higher than that of normal humans.

For example, like this:

This is a commit by Brad Fitzpatrick, the author of LiveJournal, on the memcached project.

The boss worked hard all night, inspiration gushed out, and when the sun was shining in the sky, he went to bed satisfied.

Brad also contributed code to the Go language, and his style is even wilder on this project:

Chris Lattner, the author of the LLVM compiler, is also a well-deserved nocturnal beast. He has worked at Apple and Tesla and now joins Google.

His code submission time is as follows:

Others work from 9 to 5, this guy probably works from 9 to 5...

After studying so many big names, Ivan would certainly not let go of the benevolent dictator . Guido van Rossum, the father of Python, was also stamped with the nocturnal beast certification.

This code submission time seems to say: a good day starts in the afternoon, and the night is the real coding time!

As for why nocturnal animals submit code 24 hours a day, maybe they wake up whenever they want during the day like cats...

Perpetual motion machine

In addition to diurnal and nocturnal developers, there is another species called daytime nocturnal developers . They submit code more than 24 hours a day, and their production capacity does not fluctuate significantly.

Rasmus Lerdorf , the founder of PHP, "the best language in the world" , is an excellent representative.

Since the first version of PHP could not be found on GitHub, Ivan counted the founder 's commit time on the php-src project:

It can be seen that he becomes more excited as the night goes on, but his physical energy has not been depleted too much during the day.

However, there are individuals in this species with even stronger production capabilities.

The picture below shows two web frameworks and their author, named Sebastian Riedel .

△ All are frameworks based on Perl language

This is his commit timeline for the Mojolicious framework project. The numbers are about to explode:

The most productive period is still concentrated at night.

But even during the lowest throughput period of 8am and 9am, there were more than 100 rows.

When Ivan came to this point in his statistics, he couldn't help but exclaim:

That schedule is insane. So jealous of his productivity.

It seems that each species has its own fighter.

It's hard to tell who's stronger in terms of combat effectiveness.

Who likes to code on the weekends?

Ivan's observation was turned over by Lattner, one of the famous Night Walkers and the author of the LLVM compiler.

He suggested that it might be interesting to analyze the weekdays and weekends in two separate data sets.

So Ivan really continued the story .

Because there are five working days and two rest days, if the daily capacity is evenly distributed, it should be 71.4% during the week and 28.6% on the weekend.

Then, if the proportion of weekend submissions exceeds 28.6% , it means that you prefer to write code on weekends. Otherwise, it means that you prefer to write code on weekdays.

As a result, Linus, the father of Linux ( 19.3% ) and Pike, the father of Go language ( 9.7% ), who are day workers, have higher productivity during their working days .

It is understandable. After all, working at sunrise and resting at sunset, being busy during the week and resting on weekends are all natural laws in the eyes of ordinary people.

Night walkers It is different. There are Python creator van Rossum ( 10.2% ) who likes working on weekdays, and LLVM compiler author Lattner ( 27.3% ) who prefers submitting code on weekends, slightly lower than 28.6%.

Perpetual motion machine So what?

Lerdorf, the founder of PHP, has the highest proportion of weekend submissions among all the famous programmers tested, reaching 30.3% .

Riedel, the perpetual motion fighter and author of two web frameworks, has a weekend submission rate of 26.2% , just slightly lower than 28.6%.

Overall, perpetual motion machines may be the species that prefers to work on weekends .

Doubts

So here comes the question. In less than a day, 187 comments were posted on the Hacker News discussion board, many of which raised questions.

For example, the top post is from a netizen named Dahart, who said that submission time cannot be easily equated with working time :

I always ask the team to avoid submitting code at night, on weekends, or near the weekend, because there are other people who need the code. This has been the case for at least 15 years.

In addition, Twitter user @JDevlieghere also said that the submission time is related to the git mechanism :

I ran LLVM myself and found that the code submission time was delayed by several hours.

LLVM author Lattner also seconded this issue.

However, it is still undeniable that the code submission time is a very good observation angle.

One More Thing

Sharing joy with others is worse than enjoying it alone. Ivan has open-sourced the code and warmly invites everyone to explore what species the big guys are.

What are you waiting for? Come and decipher the coding time of the domestic bigwigs.

For example, I heard that Zhang Xiaolong, a programmer in Guangzhou, likes to smoke and write code late at night, enjoying the gentleness of the night accompanied by music. I wonder if he still does this now...

Code portal:
https://gist.github.com/bessarabov/674ea13c77fc8128f24b5e3f53b7f094

Ivan's blog (observations):
https://ivan.bessarabov.com/blog/famous-programmers-work-time