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Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

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Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#101

Post by BoorishBears »

StevePerkins wrote: post #79
Communitivity wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think much of the maligning Java gets is either due to people looking at badly written Java (2k LOC classes, factories of factories of factories, 15 arg methods, import * everywhere, etc.), or claims in error because they are not based on modern Java (claiming bad parallelism a la Hensen, citing a lack of modules, noting no functional support). I think Java is a good language if your problem space is ok with the GC…

I read comments like this all the time on HN and Reddit. But it's hard for me to separate real professional experience at day jobs, from hobbyist wishful thinking in personal side projects. All I know is that I attend a lot of Java conferences and meetups, and I'm STILL waiting to encounter a flesh-and-blood human in real life whose employer really wavers between Java and Rust. That's like choosing between a Humvee a…

Seeing a company (as opposed to a person) choose between Java and Rust would paint a very bleak picture for their future.

To me it's an indication that programmers are getting to run wild past the technical domain, after all trying to hire for a Java codebase vs a Rust codebase is enough to kill a company depending on the space due to salary expectations and availability alone.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#102

Post by runjake »

pohl wrote: post #23
runjake wrote: post #4

One of the most famous examples was Jony Ive. Jony was recruited to Apple in 1992 after Steve left. Jony did not come from NeXT, as many seem to believe.

...as many seem to believe I've ever encountered anyone who thinks that.

Obviously, I have or I would not have mentioned it.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#103

Post by agloeregrets »

yoda_sl wrote: post #28

I came on board with the NeXT acquisition (or rather reverse acquisition as ex-NeXT often refer to)… So I do recall seeing a few times after we relocated to Infinite Loop, that Steve at first was just working as a consultant, and not as an employee. Thus at the time he didn’t have a badge to enter in IL1 (Infinite Loop 1: hold Apple HQ); many times when he was coming in the morning, he had to wait at the glass door t…

> More than once, Steve did cut some projects that were close to finish and you just had to go along since no one had a say in it, except Steve.

You know, this is actually a rather good thing. So many companies are just bloated with projects that they want to see through just to see them through and they make zero sense in the grand scheme of the company. If you have a single person responsible for everything that can just make the hard choices and be the bad guy it is much more healthy for the whole....assuming that person cuts the right things and makes the right choices.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#104

Post by hk1337 »

hot_gril wrote: post #31
w10-1 wrote: post #16

It's hard to overstate how bloated Apple was internally. Marketing had products for every conceivable niche. Engineering was all posturing: great hand-waving plans papered over nasty middle-management infighting. Hundreds of engineers in new glass-walled offices, producing plans. I wrote test code against a component that had been delivered months earlier only to find that it was just a stub. Even the debugger had bu…

Your description of 1997 Apple sounds uncomfortably close to modern Google. I miss working for startups.

Maybe even modern Apple, as if Apple just sort of reverted after Steve Jobs passed away.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#105

Post by Communitivity »

StevePerkins wrote: post #79
Communitivity wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think much of the maligning Java gets is either due to people looking at badly written Java (2k LOC classes, factories of factories of factories, 15 arg methods, import * everywhere, etc.), or claims in error because they are not based on modern Java (claiming bad parallelism a la Hensen, citing a lack of modules, noting no functional support). I think Java is a good language if your problem space is ok with the GC…

I read comments like this all the time on HN and Reddit. But it's hard for me to separate real professional experience at day jobs, from hobbyist wishful thinking in personal side projects. All I know is that I attend a lot of Java conferences and meetups, and I'm STILL waiting to encounter a flesh-and-blood human in real life whose employer really wavers between Java and Rust. That's like choosing between a Humvee a…

Where I work some teams are using Java, and some are just starting to use Rust. Different problem spaces entirely though, as you said. I've seen Java used here for ETL work, Modeling & Sim work, web apps, and Android. I've seen Rust on two projects, both were real-time or near-real-time efforts.

The competition I am starting to see is between C++ and Rust, with the few teams looking at Rust loving it. I did recently help write a RFP response that noted software will be written in C++ and Rust, and the RFP was awarded to us.

I am in a different world though, as I am a contractor for the DOD. It's more like a lot of small to medium sized companies than one big company, which is why some groups can use Java and others C++ and others Rust.

I have the same problem of differentiating between hobbyists and professional experience, both on HN and when interviewing. I had someone tell me they knew Java, then found out they had done maybe 5 months of Java work and didn't know some of the most basic things.

As for myself, in terms of writing professional software for clients, I've done the following, in order of amounts worked: Java, C++, Python, Javascript, Erlang, R, Ruby, Clojure, C, Scala, and C#. I've done Rust and Elixir in personal projects, but not yet for clients. I plan to transition to a full-time Rust project in the coming years.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#107

Post by Someone »

StevePerkins wrote: post #42
tester756 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You guys were creating Java? > ~1,000 classes in 1.1, ~10K in 1.2 the next year. 9K classes in a year sounds crazy as hell

A typical well-designed class will usually be a few hundred lines of code, tops. Often less than 100 lines. 9k classes * 100-300 == 900k-2.7m LOC Not TOO crazy for the most complete standard library ever developed, for a language meant from the beginning to take over enterprise business computing. How many LOC are in whatever meme language is hype this year? Hell, I feel like I see nearly that many lines of console o…

> A typical well-designed class will usually be a few hundred lines of code, tops. Often less than 100 lines.

It’s not the lines that take time; it’s getting the code to the “well-designed” state, double so (if not more) for an API.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#108

Post by m0llusk »

Yes. One of the more memorable things that happened went on when I moved my office to Infinite Loop. Steve Jobs was curious about everything, so he would walk the halls, knock on doors, introduce himself "Hi. I'm Steve Jobs." And then ask about what people were working on. I was jealous as I would have loved to point out the biggest challenges we were dealing with in the hope of getting more resources. To my astonishment essentialy every Apple employee in this position objected "You can't ask me that!" And then quit the next day. It was genuinely bizarre to witness this.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#109

Post by kitsunesoba »

hot_gril wrote: post #61
sillysaurusx wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That one was so funny. He may have been right, but Apple’s chess moves speak for themselves. They’ve built one of the most valuable companies in history.

I don't think the deprecation-happy policy helped them. I think they succeeded in spite of that because they made products that were great on their own. The iMac, iPod, and iPhone were so user-friendly, and that's orthogonal to the Mac dev experience. Also, iPhone OS was actually a great dev platform unlike Mac OS, which facilitated a huge app ecosystem at least initially (nowadays apps are less of a thing). People h…

I think the post-OS-X Mac dev experience varies a good deal depending on the type of software you're making.

Are you building a Mac-first app using the most blessed toolkit (Cocoa)? You're probably fine, so long as you're not looking to toss out a binary and forget about it for 5+ years (periodically recompiling with newer SDKs and such). Even 20 years down the road getting old FOSS Cocoa projects building and running again isn't too hard, because even though there are a lot of deprecations the deprecated stuff largely still works.

On the other hand if you're building lowest common denominator cross platform desktop apps, yeah life might be harder. Same for games. That said I think the bulk of this pain comes from making assumptions that an unavoidably changing world will remain static — the sort of backwards compatibility provided by Microsoft is really the exception not the rule, and even there it's starting to flake away likely because the teams at MS are growing tired of having nearly unbounded backwards compatibility act as a ball and chain on OS development.

For running apps that were created without their devs' intent of long-term maintenance I think the best thing is probably third party compatibility layers like WINE, which allow for a pinned API target without locking OS vendors into decades old decisions and emergences.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#110

Post by smm11 »

I was not there, but two things from that summer have stuck with me.

First, Steve killed Cyberdog. You'd have thought the world was coming to an end. Second, he came in with his Openstep Thinkpad, and that was it for months. I thought they'd turn that OS around, leverage MAE, and have Openstep 5 running by mid-98.

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