Crazy and sad. Reading his letter, I couldn’t help but get the impression that he has no idea a) about the current state-of-the-art in drive media and filesystems, and b) that Reiser 5 seems like it’s never going to happen.

It’s almost like he’s been frozen in time for nearly 20 years. Reading his letter was like pulling out and reading an old copy of Dr. Dobb’s journal. He is where he deserves to be — he is the architect of his own situation — it’s just wild to think of how much he’s missed out on due to his evil actions. It’s quite literally pitiful.

Interesting! From his post,

Mikhail advised me to use balanced trees instead of extensible hashing

And

I never told Mikhail that Oracle had tried implementing a filesystem using balanced trees, and its performance was terrible leading to most insiders in the industry concluding that balanced trees performed poorly for filesystem File size patterns.

Of course, that filesystem exists today as btrfs.

Not being familiar with this, the opening of his letter was an actual spit-take.

That pretty much kills it