by
Peter Seibel
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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 their online form to send you a CD. I used every variation of my name, because I didn't want their duplicate suppression to only send me one CD, because they had those 100 free hours, or 5,000 free hours. I submitted this form a couple thousand times and for a week or so the postman would be coming with bundles of CDs wrapped up.
My mom was like, “Damn it, Brad, you're going to get in trouble.” I was like, “Eh—their fucking fault, right?” Then one day I get a phone call and I actually picked up the phone, which I normally didn't, and it was someone from AOL. They were just screaming at me. “Stop sending us all these form submissions!” I'm not normally this quick and clever, but I just yelled back, “Why are you sending me all this crap? Every day the postman comes! He's dropping off all these CDs!” They're like, “We're so sorry, sir. It won't happen again.” Then I used all those and I decorated my dorm room in college with them. I actually still have them in a box in the garage. I can't get rid of them because I just remember them being such a good decoration at one point.
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; you just see the structure and think, “Oh, yeah, I probably forgot to close the namespace in a header file.” I think the new C++ spec, even though it adds so much complexity, has a lot of stuff that'll make it less painful to type—as far as number of keystrokes. The auto variables and the for loops. It's more like Python style. And the lambdas. It's enough that I could delude myself into thinking I'm writing in Python, even though it's C++.
blonde, brunette, redhead
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 working. I've seen young programmers say, “Oh, shit, it doesn't work,” and then rewrite it all. Stop. Try to figure out what's going on. Learn how to write things incrementally so that at each stage you could verify it.
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 always moving forward. Looking at, say, international politics over the last ten years, the consolidation of big media and the corrupting effects of that have not been compensated for by the open network. That's a big disappointment.
Hundreds of thousands of people have died as a direct consequence of that. That's really sad. I would like for the network to be doing a better job so that kind of stuff doesn't happen again. It's not clear yet what transformations to the network have to occur in order to accomplish that. And maybe it'll be fine on its own, but I'm more pessimistic. I think we need to figure out the next leap in order to overcome whatever is not working now.
lol
Eich: [...] But it was definitely painful and it takes too long. As Oscar Wilde said of socialism, “It takes too many evenings.”
it's painful how often this quote is misused
Seibel: Speaking of writing intricate code, I've noticed that people who are too smart, in a certain dimension anyway, make the worst code. Because they can actually fit the whole thing in their head they can write these great reams of spaghetti code.
Bloch: I agree with you that people who are both smart enough to cope with enormous complexity and lack empathy with the rest of us may fall prey to that. They think, “I can understand this and I can use it, so it has to be good.”
Seibel: Is there something intrinsic in programming that's always going to draw people with that kind of mentality?
Bloch: Absolutely. We love brainteasers. But we have to temper this love with the knowledge that we're solving real problems for real people. And if we don't do that we are, essentially, whacking off. I think that part of the failure of the first company that I was involved in was due to the fact that we didn't understand that what we were doing wasn't pure engineering.
Armstrong: Well, as an undergraduate some of the courses involved writing programs and I really enjoyed that. And I got to be very good at debugging. If all else failed, I would debug people's programs. The standard debugging was one beer. Then it would go up—a two-beer problem or a three-beer problem or something like that.
Seibel: That was in terms of how many beers they had to buy you when you debugged their program?
Armstrong: Yeah, when I fixed their program. I used to read programs and think, “Why are they writing it this way; this is very complicated,” and I'd just rewrite them to simplify them. It used to strike me as strange that people wrote complicated programs. I could see how to do things in a few lines and they'd written tens of lines and I'd sort of wonder why they didn't see the simple way. I got quite good at that.
Armstrong: Yes. Why this is I don't know. The funny thing is, if you give two programmers the same problem—it depends on the problem, but problems of a more mathematical nature, they can often end up writing the same code. Subject to just formatting issues and relabeling the variables and the function names, it's isomorphic—it's exactly the same algorithms. Are we creating these things or are we just pulling the cobwebs off? It's like a statue that's there and we're pulling the cobwebs off and revealing the algorithm that's always been there. So are we inventing a new algorithm or are we inventing a structure that already exists? Some algorithms feel like that. I think it's more the mathematical algorithms. I don't get that feeling when I'm implementing a telephony protocol or something. That's not a statue that I'm pulling the cobwebs off.
cute
Norvig: I think the people that are really successful are the same—at least that's what I see around here. But, yeah, it is a little bit more of, “Can I quickly get an understanding of what I need,” and less of, “I need complete understanding.” I think some of it is bravado, this willingness to say, “I'm just going to go ahead and do it,” the fearlessness of saying, “I don't understand everything that's going on, but I went into the documentation and I learned these three things. I tried it and it worked, so I'm just going to go ahead.” That gets you to a certain point, but I think to really be a good programmer, you can't just do that. You have to understand a little bit more, and say, “Is it safe, what I'm doing here? Or what are the failure cases? Sure, I tried it once and it worked, but is it always going to work? How do I write test cases to show that and to understand it a little better, and then once I've done that, can I extract what I've done and publish a new tool that other people can use because I've put these pieces together in a certain way.”
Seibel: What about The Art of Computer Programming? Some of the people I've talked to on this have absolutely read it from cover to cover. Some people have it on the shelf and use it as a reference. And some people just have it on the shelf.
Norvig: At one point I had it as my monitor stand because it was one of the biggest set of books I had, and it was just the right height. That was nice because it was always there, and I guess then I was more prone to use it as a reference because it was just right in front of me.
Seibel: But you had to lift up the monitor every time you wanted to look at it?
Norvig: No, I had the box set. You had to pull hard, but you could pull one of the box. Now I'm less likely to use any book for reference—I'm just likely to do a search.
made me chuckle