Thursday, January 06, 2005

Asperger's syndrome and BitTorrent

Wired has a nice profile of Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent. BitTorrent is a distributed P2P program that allows for sharing of massive files. Reportedly, it accounts for a third(!) of all bandwidth usage right now.

Bram, who was co-captain of the Stuyvesant math team in high school, is apparently part of the Autistic Nation: "Bram will just pace around the house all day long, back and forth, in and out of the kitchen. Then he'll suddenly go to his computer and the code just comes pouring out. And you can see by the lines on the screen that it's clean," Jenna says. "It's clean code." She pats her husband affectionately on the head: "My sweet little autistic nerd boy." (Cohen in fact has Asperger's syndrome, a condition on the mild end of the autism spectrum that gives him almost superhuman powers of concentration but can make it difficult for him to relate to other people.)

How long before O'Reilly publishes a book called Managing Asperger Coders?

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