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Some time ago there was an article surrounding the figure heads of UNIX and their beards. This is the best reconstruction of that to my knowledge.

You've probably heard the term "Unix beard":

"Facial hair that all Unix experts are mysteriously compelled to grow. The length, bushiness, and unkemptness of the Unix beard are all directly proportional to the owner's expertise."

All those below have suffered cases of pogonotrophy, perhaps to an extreme.

Tamir Khason in Israel suggests that programming languages designed by guys with facial hair become popular (C, C++, Basic, PERL) while languages designed by smooth-shaven guys don't (Smalltalk, Eiffel, Scheme, Haskell, Erlang). He suggests that according to this rule, Python and Ruby are in trouble popularity-wise.

A couple of people have pointed out that Ruby's creator, Matz, has recently grown a beard as has Python creator Guido van Rossum C# may still be in trouble, however. Anders Hejlsberg is still clean-shaven Larry Wall has always been famous for his perl language, and touts a bushy mustache Richard Stallman, famous for Emacs, founder of GNU Project and Free Software Foundation presents a wonderful beard Although Eric Raymond did the Art of Unix programming, he has only really been famous for Fetchmail, hence his smaller mustache Alan Cox has done a serious amount of kernel hacking, hence his huge unkempt beard Something is wrong with this picture, Andrew Morton, a unix expert and kernel programmer must have passed the beard like the Olympic torch to Alan Cox Dennis Ritchie, one man behind C, UNIX and much more, has a full beard So too does Brian Kernighan Ken Thompson, invented the UNIX OS (with D Ritchie) in 1969 for Bell Labs, surprise! He has a beard too! Nick Kew, a very dedicated Apache developer and author of "The Apache Modules Book" has a beard too qmail patcher and programmer at large, John Simpson also has a beard UNIX guru, programmer and Sylpheed patcher, Godwin Stewart has also lost his razor Theo de Raadt has a few days stubble, needs a bit more time to stabilise itself Steve Jobs updated NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP spin-off, OS X Petter Reinholdtsen, creater of Skolelinux has grown a beard Andrew Wales, fan of unix on the server suffers from lack of facial hair, probably due to an xp desktop Jeff Makey, designated Sun Guru at San Diego Supercomputer Center enjoys a full beard James Gosling, father of Java sports a beard

Want to start a-fresh and loose that beard? Take a look at my guide to wet shaving.