I was one of the 'lucky' people who got my question answered on the Slashdot article, regarding Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP), and I've used OpenBSD as my web server for about a year now, with much success. While you may not care for Theo's attitude, or some of his theories on what attributes define an excellent programmer, it's likely that most people who try OpenBSD with an open mind will find much to praise about the OS.

It's not perfect, mind you, and sometimes Theo's holier-than-thou attitude creates friction on the mailing lists, but it is my conclusion that without his completely obsessive-compulsive control of the project, it simply wouldn't have anything to differentiate itself from the other BSD variants. Yes, he's a control freak, but he gets results. Here is a system that has but one goal: a secure out-of-the-box, open-source, fully standards compliant BSD Unix distribution.

And even though it would be easy for me to take offense at the 1-sentence answer he gave to my question, I am instead filled with respect for someone who has set a major goal and refuses to be sidetracked by other aspects of the technology, no matter how cool those may be.

As far as what he said about 'knowing your interfaces', I think that's good advice, but certainly our work as programmers is to get the code written first, and worry about perfection later. Perfection in code comes after a tool is written, re-written, then written again, the last time with a real grounding in what interfaces are used, and what the security implications of this will be. It's very difficult to know your interfaces when you may not even know which interfaces you are going to use!

Anyway, I just found Perl Monks about a week ago, and I am very pleased to find a site like this. I use Perl all the time on my OpenBSD box, and although I am a complete newbie, it has been easy for me to get my work done with the great resources the Perl community has to offer.