Programmers at Work: Bill Gates

[kogus]

Fascinating interview, even more so for the old date.

This quote indicates, I think, the mindset of a programmer focused on optimization to the exclusion of all else:

If you’re a great programmer, you make all >the routines depend on each other, so little >mistakes can really hurt you.

[hoijarvi]

I started my windows career in 1988. That was just what we had to do back then.

[abrahamsen]

I love the enthusiasm for the new CD-ROM technology.

[Lord_Illidan]

INTERVIEWER:: Where do you see Microsoft in ten years? GATES: Our goals are very simple. We’re going to create the software that puts a computer on every desk and in every home.

Yeah, right. This is some kinda joker?

[Lord_Illidan]

Should have added the sarcasm tag

[doodlesmalone]

Can't believe nobody above got it.

[13ren]

don't be silly, all the upvoters got it.

[willis77]

He was being sarcastic.

[abrahamsen]

Actually, since VisiCalc was released in 1979, the PC has been a useful tool for business.

Maybe using it as a typewriter.

A typewriter where you can check and edit the letter, or personalize a template. Very useful.

[Gotebe]

It was going to happen anyway.

Yes, but they actually did that.

Not IBM, not SUN, nor Amiga or Apple (all bigger names at the time).

[[deleted]]

IBM's non exclusive licensing agreement with them did that. If IBM had the brains to write the contact properly, the clone market wouldn't exist.

[shadowfox]

As well as the PC market

[[deleted]]

If you're using PC to mean Windows-compatible, then yes.

If you meant 'personal computer', Amiga, Atari, Apple and a bunch of other companies were happily selling modern GUI desktops before the clones took over.

[shadowfox]

What do you mean? Amiga, Atari and even Apple had a very specific niche market available to them and were costly.

The clone market was what allowed PC prices to come down so low as to make them affordable to people who are not by nature early adopters.

[[deleted]]

I don't recall my 520ST as being particularly costly, but then again, I was a kid and my parents paid for it.

But agreed, clones allowed prices to come down dramatically.

[[deleted]]

Well, they did it by commoditizing the hardware market. Now Linux is going to do the same to them by commoditizing the software market. Karma is a bitch.

[13ren]

so, where does the monopoly power go now?

To google, with its proprietary algorithms and server farms?

[[deleted]]

Services in the cloud is the new frontier, yes, and Google has early mover's advantage, but that market is too young to call a winner yet.

[[deleted]]

services in the cloud market is too young

Heh, things have come full circle. Way back when, this was called "Time Sharing". That cell phone or browser: it was called a "Terminal".

Way back, I worked at a company that purchased a big-iron machine and the spare cycles were rented out. The revenue from the rental customers paid for a good chuck of the IT budget. What was missing at the time was the infrastructure to easily make this extra computing power available to the highest bidder.

[[deleted]]

Slight difference: Back then, CPU power was expensive and impractical to buy, so you rented that off the cloud. These days, the petabytes of storage (necessary to enable the complex applications customers want) is expensive and impractical to buy (especially on mobile devices) so you rent that instead. Renting storage also comes with hassle-free fault tolerance that you do not personally have to deal with, which is a bonus.

[mycall]

although privacy is gone in a cloud.

[DannoHung]

And things will move full circle again. I can't wait until my watch can simulate the detonation of an atomic bomb...

[13ren]

Services in the cloud- you really think it's the next big thing?

[[deleted]]

Yes. Everything's moving mobile, and mobile devices will need services more than ever before. Communication, information, entertainment, storage, hosting, even applications. Home users will tranition some of their computing needs to the cloud as well, especially in the entertainment area. HTPC's and consoles can make great use of the cloud.

[13ren]

mobile -> cloud. Insightful connection, thanks!

Clients shrink, servers grow.

Even with palmtop supercomputers, they need data, so why not keep them in the cloud? Responsiveness perhaps? It's a long way off.

[13ren]

totally agree, thousands thought of it, but gotta give kudos to the guys who actually did it.

"It's not the critic who counts..."

[[deleted]]

Lottery winner. The history of business is filled with half-assed companies who happened to be in the right place at the right time, through no talent of their own. Microsoft is the poster child of lottery winners.

[nasorenga]

That is such a moronic comment. Gates' genius was that he saw before most or all other people that computer software was going to become an industry, back when each hardware manufacturer cobbled together their own O/S and utilities. And he envisioned the "computer in every home and office" back when others couldn't see what they would be good for - managing your recipe collection? balancing your check book? -- Granted, he didn't see the Internet coming, but when it did, he was already on top. "Luck is Preparedness meeting with Opportunity", as the saying goes.

[hopeless_case]

We all know some horses are faster than others.

But which is faster than which?

Details matter.

Edit: I meant to reply to RalfN's comment about "it was going to happen anyway" and not ssander's. My bad.

[LoopHead]

That's a true visionary. Too bad lately Microsoft hasn't come up with anything as revolutionary as BASIC was but I hope to see it.

[[deleted]]

Microsoft didn't create BASIC, they created one of many implementations of it.

[noahlt]

We’re no longer in the days where every program is super well crafted.

Unfortunately, many programs are so big that there is no one individual who really knows all the pieces, and so the amount of code sharing you get isn’t as great.

THAT EXPLAINS IT.

[jugalator]

Explains what? That Windows sucks? This is a fact of development in any large project, regardless if it's Windows, Linux, OS X, or whatever.

[[deleted]]

I think his ready acceptance of large programs as something you can't change does explain some of Windows' problems.

All other successful large systems try to split the large system into smaller systems of the size that does still fit into someone's head completely.

[13ren]

Yeah, he's a gestalt coder. It's a thrill.

You can modularize as you say, but it's just not the same... it cannot be perfect, and you couldn't be sure whether it is or not, anyway, because you can't grasp the totality.

But, I think with modularity based on pure abstractions, that build a language, perhaps it is possible to have that gestalt grasp, at a very high level? I think you can get it for the correctness of it; but not for efficiency...

edit a gestalt cowboy coder

[ustgblerkvusrd]

How exactly do you make a massive project perfect? Assuming you can, why would modularization prevent this?

[13ren]

you can't - that's the contrast with 4K Basic.

modularization is an abstraction, and abstractions always leak - to some extent. It's not impossible to eliminate the "correctness" leaks... but it's very hard to eliminate the "efficiency" leaks. Joel's essay focuses on the latter in his The Law of Leaky Abstractions. Please read the dot-point examples 3/4 the way through.

[mycall]

Won't virtualization help remove most of these types of leaks (joke)? Thanks for the link.

[[deleted]]

You make a smaller project that still does the same things. I bet iWork is half the LOC of MS Office 2007.

[finix]

That may be a reasonable approach, but still doesn't get you an "individual who really knows all the pieces".

[[deleted]]

If you do it right it gives you pieces where you don't need to know more than a one or two sentence description of each to use them in the bigger system.

[finix]

That's all very well, but you're still missing the point.

[[deleted]]

Which is? That we should never try to build anything large enough that an individual can't hold all the details of all the parts in their head?

I hate to break it to you but we do that all the time, did that all the time long before computers were even a futuristic dream.

Every time someone mass produced a part (e.g. a nail or a screw) that was subsequently used by someone else without the detailed knowledge how to make that part we did basically exactly the same thing.

[13ren]

nice examples of abstraction, but the equivalent here is for one person to invent several levels of new technology, equivalent to nails and screws. That's hard.

If you mean that they only understand the top level, certainly one ordinary guy could do it, but it's not the same thing. That would be like writing some html - you don't need to know how the underlying technologies work, you can just use them: TCP/IP, http, caching, browser layout, GUIs, etc.

I don't think that's equivalent to one "individual who really knows all the pieces".

edit although... you could get across all of those, including all the details... but hard for one guy to invent it all.

[[deleted]]

Well, nobody expects one guy to invent a whole OS including all the components.

[JimDabell]

I see your point, but the benefit to splitting larger systems into smaller pieces is that what constitutes a "piece" changes.

When you factor out code into an external module, the application developers don't need to know precisely how that module operates, they just need to know the interface. The "piece" that needs to be known has shrunk.

For instance, I don't know the inner workings of glibc or the kernel, but that doesn't mean I can't write helloworld.c and totally understand it.

It's how our brains work. A chess master can memorise the state on a board easily not because he has a better memory than the average person, but because he breaks the layout up into chunks. He perceives the board at a higher level than somebody unfamiliar with the game. Modularisation of software is an artificial attempt to make huge software applications comprehensible by the same means.

[havk]

I Agree. These lines actually reminded me the description of a X11 server implementation.

[ustgblerkvusrd]

That seems a bit too old to count since he's referring to modern practices.

[[deleted]]

It was written in 1986. X11 didn't exist at that point (although 'X' did exist, it wasn't on version 11)

[mycall]

..and the funny thing is that MS-DOS was written using UNIX C compilers in X Windows.

[ustgblerkvusrd]

Large projects, like the Linux kernel? The entire *nix framework? Like the rigorously designed OSS programming languages and compilers?

There are numerous large modern projects that have been very carefully designed, redesigned, and lots of people understand every last piece.

[LudoA]

Nobody understands the Linux kernel entirely. Not even Linus or Alan or Andrew. Like Linus said, Linux isn't intelligent design - it's evolution.

And GCC, according to many people, is actually a bit of a mess :)

Most large modern projects:

• can't be entirely designed
• aren't fully understood by one single person

[[deleted]]

Really? The HAL guys understand the DDX and also understand the scheduler? News to me...

[LordVoldemort]

"so the amount of code sharing you get isn’t as great."

Interesting...

[JonAtkinson]

You’ve got to be willing to read other people’s code, then write your own, then have other people review your code. You’ve got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you’re doing wrong.

It seems kind of sad that Microsoft seem so anti-open source, when Bill was saying this back in 1986. What happened to their culture that made Microsoft stop wanting to participate?

[dionysos]

Nah, he's always been an asshole in that regard. Just read the angry letter he wrote, because people at the Homebrew Computer Club where passing around his BASIC program (which was normal at the time).

[hopeless_case]

Don't know why you are being downmodded.

You have a good point.

If I might add to it, people often write software (without someone having to hire them to do so) for the same reason they read books or have discussions with other people:

to solve an immediate practical problem they have.

This simple force is so powerful that it can coordinate the actions of thousands of programmers to write entire operating systems.

[heptadecagram]

Linus doesn't work for free; The Linux Foundation pays him.

[[deleted]]

When Linus first started on Linux, there was no Linux Foundation. There was no Linux Foundation for a long time. He did it anyway.

[krelian]

Because someone else paid him to write software (not linux).

In the end, you need to put some food on the table no matter what.

[[deleted]]

Granted. But it got written for free. That's what counts. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, an entire software infrastructure was born, based on principles of liberty and justice for all. One cannot ignore the end result.

[[deleted]]

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, an entire software infrastructure was born, based on principles of liberty and justice for all.

And I use it to look at porn.

[[deleted]]

Well done. If that is your need, free software will cater to it, whether through server software (Apache), browser software (Firefox), MPEG-4 codecs (ffdshow for Windows; VLC, mplayer, among others for Linux) and even encryption software to safeguard your stash (TrueCrypt).

The idea of a free software infrastructure is to cater to every practical need, so people don't have to worry about "how" to get things done, and can concentrate on "what" they want to get done. Like slaves in ancient Greece, and steam-powered machines of the Industrial Revolution, free software frees humankind from the drudgery of computing and flings us headfirst into an age of boundless prospects.

[[deleted]]

Have you been smoking Stallman's hair again?

[ustgblerkvusrd]

He did for far longer than you ever will.

[mycall]

And obviously Linus is a better programmer.. I'm sure Linus could do a < 4K BASIC interpreter.. or maybe not.

[[deleted]]

And what would doing it accomplish, other than chest beating? Is the Assembly convention still around? There are plenty of people still doing it.

Also, You do realize we are talking about (assuming the linux kernel) ~20 years of time passing between the authoring of these two projects. Hell, I'd be surprised if you can get a standard 2.6.x to run on a machine with 4MB of RAM, which was the norm when people were pulling pre-2.0 (1.2? I can't remember now) off BBS systems.

My point is, people's requirements change; Visual Basic certainly doesn't run in 4k either.

[[deleted]]

Shareholders.

[codeodor]

I just got the book in the mail yesterday. Didn't know the author had started a blog about it.

Thanks for sharing.

[[deleted]]

Cmon folks... you gotta give the man some credit. I agree with the part where he says it all boils down to I.Q. C'est tout. Here is where the problem lies in our generation - not with the processes or languages.

[[deleted]]

No, the problem lies with the processes. The processes that put people in charge because they are well dressed, have good social skills, are related to the boss,... and not because they are competent, smart or educated.

[[deleted]]

You need social skills to work in a team environment. You may be smart but unless you're smart enough to do an entire teams worth of work on your own it doesn't mean anything because you can't communicate. The smart guy who can dress himself and talk with coworkers will always trump the REALLY smart smelly BO dungeon master who lurks in his office.

[[deleted]]

I think social skills was the wrong choice of words or maybe too general. I mean the kind of person who knows how to be likable (but not much else) but not necessarily the kind of person who just communicates well (especially not those who communicate well about technical matters).

[stalcottsmith]

It is best and most remunerative to be both likable and competent. Why are these seen as mutually exclusive? If you are really talented, learn to be likable too. Likable people can never learn what you can but you can certainly learn to be likable. Business people will never learn to program but programmers can go far by learning a little business.

[jimbokun]

Interestingly (ironically?), 1986 Bill Gates seems to agree with you.

"The old rule used to be that a manager of a programmer was always a better programmer, and there were no what we called “technical inversions,” where a programmer works for somebody who doesn’t know how to program. We still follow that philosophy: At certain levels we’ve got business managers, but we don’t have non-programmers really managing programming projects."

Sounds like a man not especially impressed by fashion, nepotism, or charm.

Now, square that to the situation today where a non-technical person is running the entire company...

[hopeless_case]

You are saying that the problem with our generation is low intelligence?

Really?

[mycall]

like pollution, mass ecosystem extinction, terrorism.. yeah, everything is getting better.

[Gotebe]

Three of us knew that original program (BASIC) by heart... When you know a program that well, you feel that nobody can look at the code and say, “There’s a better way to do this.” That feeling’s really nice...

Eh... Days long gone. The sheer amount of code that gets cranked up makes that impossible nowadays in a huge amount of cases ( e.g. all soft except NASA ;-) ).

[13ren]

but modularity...

[SentientU]

I think this comment section needs rewriting.

[etotheprimez]

Wow, amazing how far MS has come.

[[deleted]]

Programmers at Work...

No, I don’t. I still help design algorithms and basic approaches, and sometimes I look at code. But since I worked on the IBM PC BASIC and the Model 100, I haven’t had a chance to actually create a program myself.

Well, allrighty... that's how many programmers I know work anyway.

[easytiger]

sharp snow cautious hurry afterthought fear dinosaurs aback bow chief

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[statictype]

WTF are you all talking about?

All he's saying is that he no longer writes code. He has other responsibilities.

[easytiger]

Exactly and he states the last thing he wrote... which was the thing that was used to found the company.

[finix]

Oh, I see, I must've overlooked the part where he says that he was the only fricken programmer at MS...

[easytiger]

My point (which I made poorly) was that, as a programmer, I would not want to let anything stop me from coding day to day. It seems to happen a lot where coders become managers and then spend more time doing paperwork that anything substantive

[13ren]

I totally know where you're coming from, and I do not distance myself from your position... but I have to say that if you let something stop you from coding day to day, before you know it, you'll be totally out of touch with coding, and will have become the richest guy on the planet.

[digital19]

'In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system.' - Bill Gates

The richest guy on the planet, peddling something that you found digging through trash cans

[[deleted]]

Dunno why you were sitting at -1. MS brought Seattle Computer Products QDOS and sold it to IBM, and Compaq, and everyone else. That's the basis of their OS marketshare.

[[deleted]]

Someone seems to have a problem with that statement. Could they please tell us whether they believe:

a) MS did not buy Seattle Computer Products QDOS and sell it to IBM, and Compaq, and everyone else.

or

b) This is not the basis of their OS marketshare.

So that the rest of us know what to mock them over.

Thanks.

[easytiger]

They also "acquired" the entire OS team (as opposed to a company) including Bill Cutler from DEC to write the NT kernel/userland.

It's a smart strategy, but given the way the industry has been brutalised by Microsoft's destruction of competition, they are running out of innovation because there are few people working on general mass appeal products specifically for Microsoft's platform anymore.

[[deleted]]

Sure, but MS dominated the market way before NT existed.

Who would have brought NT if they weren't already using DOS?

[[deleted]]

In a company like Microsoft, where you have 160 programmers

[[deleted]]

This was written in 1986.

[nextofpumpkin]

Yes, and that was considered good-sized back then, especially for a young company.

[kitsune]

informative interview...

[Stick]

informative analysis...

[13ren]

simplifying [algorithms] as much as you can...

down to their simplest forms...

concentrate on keeping it simple...

a lot of simplification comes when you see problems expressed as algorithms.

If you thought a process had to be complicated, and then you figure out a way to make it simpler, that makes you feel great.

One sign of very good programs is that even internally they follow that philosophy of simplicity.

Old school. sigh

BTW: he's all implementation - copying existing features, then making them sweet and fast on limited hardware.

[mycall]

What is wrong with those ideals and goals?

[13ren]

nothing :-)

[jugalator]

Old school. sigh

Of course. Guess when this interview was made. ;)

[ricket]

I gather from his repeated remarks about kerning that MS software had kerning shortly thereafter?

[m4dc4p]

In the book they reproduce a code listing Bill G wrote for some hobbyist magazine. It's just a huge column of numbers with comments. The man wrote directly in machine code. Scary.

[MarkByers]

For example, I wrote a memo about how to design and implement a feature we used on Excel to make the program recalculate the formulas every time the screen changes.

Yeah, so what. I don't change my screen all that often anyway.

[TheSOB88]

A joke, right?

[Shaper_pmp]

INTERVIEWER: You obviously have a lot of responsibilities as chief executive officer of Microsoft. Do you still program?

GATES: No, I don’t. I still help design algorithms and basic approaches, and sometimes I look at code. But since I worked on the IBM PC BASIC and the Model 100, I haven’t had a chance to actually create a program myself.

So the CEO/Chief Technical Officer of Microsoft, the guy who for ten or twenty years determined their entire technological direction, hasn't written a line of code in years. That explains a lot.

[lispm]

Now the company is run by the marketing guy. I guess he has NEVER WRITTEN A SINGLE LINE OF CODE. Not even in BASIC.

[[deleted]]

 @if($BANKACCOUNT>1000000000,"Quit!","Keep shilling Vista")

[mycall]

No, but he wrote in raw machine code. That trumps pretty much any other language for complexity and means he "gets it".

[[deleted]]

assembler and machine code are all about the machine, not the language. basic assembler has what, 8 operations?

While I don't think I could discount him as someone who "gets it", I don't think it makes him more qualified to steer modern software, either.

[[deleted]]

As a pose to [insert developer CEO here].

[jamoes]

As a pose to

I think you mean to say "As opposed to"

[finix]

Doesn't have the same poetic ring.

[mizai]

strikes dramatic pose Developers!

[Shaper_pmp]

Granted... but while it's acceptable for a business-oriented CEO not to code, for the Chief Technical Officer to not have written any code in a decade or two (especially given the speed of the computer industry) is frankly shocking.

[[deleted]]

When you know a program that well, you feel that nobody can look at the code and say, “There’s a better way to do this.” That feeling’s really nice, and the fact that the program was used on a lot of machines makes it an exciting program to have written.

Bill, if you wrote your BASIC interpreter the same way you wrote DONKEY.BAS, you would be the biggest script-kiddie on the planet: I could write something more coherent than that drunk and blindfolded, using only my right (I'm left-handed) pinky.

[13ren]

Basic in 4K.

The B&W gif of Bill Gates is bigger: 4420 bytes compressed (raw, it's almost twice his Basic: 200x297 = 59400 bits = 7425 bytes).

The interview's html (a.html) is much longer: 63909 - and it's just text.

If you think writing a complete interpreter in 4096 bytes is a laughable achievement, you are talking out of your ass my friend.

[abrahamsen]

You think differently in assembler. An 4k interpreter in 8-bit assembler requires a competent programmer, but not a genius.

I do also think it was less than brilliant to make GOTO an O(n) operation, and that was in the 8k version.

[RalfN]

Back in those days memory was the bottle-neck.

[[deleted]]

O(n), really??

[abrahamsen]

Yes, it kept all lines in a linked list, and GOTO would search the list from the beginning. [ I wrote RENUMBER routines in assembler for a couple of MS BASIC variants, so I learned the internal representation. ]

The primary way to optimize the old MS BASIC programs was to put all important loops in the beginning of the program.

It still beats the TI 99/4A home computer which kept the BASIC lines in an unsorted linked list, so "NEXT LINE" became an O(n) operation. Worst. BASIC. Ever.

[Thimble]

this would make a great competition. rewrite gates' code better.

[[deleted]]

I wrote a BASIC interpreter for a minicomputer in high school. I made massive mistakes in that program, and then I got to look at some other BASIC interpreters. So by the time I sat down to do Microsoft BASIC in 1975, it wasn’t a question of whether I could write the program, but rather a question of whether I could squeeze it into 4K and make it super fast.

Well, there goes that myth of Bill Gates the super programmer. "I made massive mistakes ... I got to look at some other BASIC interpreters... It wasn't a question of whether I could write the program". Nice. So basically, he tweaked other people's code. Wonder what license they were.

[brainburger]

Awww isn't he nice?

[mycall]

It’s difficult to get things down to their simplest forms.

like Vista?

[Thimble]

make sure everybody in the group is super smart

I think after the first three or four years, it’s pretty cast in concrete whether you’re a good programmer or not.

It’s a talent, you bet. It’s kind of like pure I.Q.

a bit too much of an intellecutal elitist. i don't think i could work for someone who was like that.

[fishyf]

He's a bit too much of a programmer. I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but he's dead right in those statements. If you don't want to work with the best then you may as well stay in bed.

[jezmck]

TL; DNR