Eich: [...] But it was definitely painful and it takes too long. As Oscar Wilde said of socialism, “It takes too many evenings.”
Seibel: You said earlier that you got into computers because you thought they would make the world a better place.
Crockford: That's my intention.
Seibel: How's that working out?
Crockford: For the most part, we've done pretty good. I think the world is a better place, although it's not alwa…
Seibel: What do you think is the most important skill for a programmer to have?
Fitzpatrick: Thinking like a scientist; changing one thing at a time. Patience and trying to understand the root cause of things. Especially when you're debugging something or designing something that's not quite wor…
Fitzpatrick: I don't mind it. The syntax is terrible and totally inconsistent and the error messages, at least from GCC, are ridiculous. You can get 40 pages of error spew because you forgot some semicolon. But—like anything else—you quickly memorize all the patterns. You don't even read the words;…
Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I worked at Tektronix for a while. Before I had any official job, I got some hosting account. I got kicked off of AOL for writing bots, flooding their chat rooms, and just being annoying. I was scripting the AOL client from another Windows program. I also wrote a bot to flood the…
