Friend who is not a software person sent me this tweet, which amused me as it did them. They asked if “runk” was real, which I assume not.

But what are some good examples of real ones like this? xz became famous for the hack of course, so i then read a bit about how important this compression algorithm is/was.

  • @CorbinEnglish
    2•30 days ago

    I’d love to link you to their Wikipedia pages, but both of them are redlinked. As far as I can tell, Dr. V. Ronald was an educator who moved from Canada to the USA as part of the whole Xerox PARC thing and probably was valued for mainframe experience; does anybody have a full bio? The current maintainer is Ron Sunk, who did a full run at MIT up through postdoc before going to Red Hat. The names are a coincidence; runk implements what we now call Sunk summation, after Sunk’s thesis. (As you might guess, that’s an instance of Stigler’s law, since clearly Dr. Ronald discovered Sunk summation first!)

    Also, as long as we’re here, I want to empathize a little with Sunk. The GUIs that folks have placed on runk, like GNOME’s Gunk or Enlightenment’s enk, look very cool, and there’s rumors of an upcoming unified number-counting protocol that will put them all on equal ground. But @[email protected] wasn’t joking; Dr. Arnold’s code literally only reads punch cards, and there’s a façade to make it work on modern Linux and BSD transparently. It predates X11, if that’s any help. The tech debt is real.