Havoc Pennington works at Red Hat, where he heads the desktop team. He is well known also for his major contributions to GNOME, his GTK+ programming book, plus the freedesktop.org initiative which aims to standardize the X11 desktop environments. His full real name, found on his official government documents, is "Robert Sanford Havoc Pennington." Everyone calls him Havoc, and always has. "I didn't make it up," he adds. "There isn't a cool story about it, my parents are just weird. It is not a nickname. No, I do not wreak havoc, usually. Yes, I have heard any and all jokes you can think of about this."
In the Linux desktop world, there's widespread sentiment that high-level
language technologies such as garbage collection, sandboxed code, and so
forth would be valuable to have and represent an improvement over C/C++.
Several desktop projects are actively interested in this kind of technology:
GNOME: many developers feel that this is the right direction Mozilla: to take
full advantage of XUL, it has to support more than just JavaScript
OpenOffice.org: has constantly flirted with Java, and is considering using
Java throughout the codebase Evolution: has considered writing new code and
features in Mono, though they are waiting for a GNOME-wide decision
Just these four projects add up to probably 90% of the lines of code in a
Linux desktop built around them.
For some time now... (more)
Havoc Pennington works at Red Hat, where he heads the desktop team. He is well known also for his major contributions to GNOME, his GTK+ programming book, plus the freedesktop.org initiative which aims to standardize the X11 desktop environments. His full real name, found on his official government documents, is "Robert Sanford Havoc Pennington." Everyone calls him Havoc, and always has. "I didn't make it up," he adds. "There isn't a cool story about it, my parents are just weird. It is not a nickname. No, I do not wreak havoc, usually. Yes, I have heard any and all jokes you can think of about this."
Paula Cheung
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