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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?

#61

Post by hot_gril »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #53
hot_gril wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this the one with the loaded question/insult from an audience member about deprecating a framework? Cause I agree that Apple has been too developer-hostile on Mac OS for a very long time, even though I'm mostly on the user side (but have also done a little Mac dev). They unnecessarily break third-party software too often, to the point where many devs have given up on proper Mac support and just thrown things into…

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 have their complaints, but it's a paradise compared to creating Mac apps because there aren't too many wrong ways to do something, the OS handles a lot more for you, and initially it was a gold rush because of how readily you could profit from making apps. It became standard for everything to have an iPhone app.

Macs, on the other hand, always suffered from a lack of third-party software. Eventually it began to matter less cause of web stuff, but it's still an issue.

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

#62

Post by killjoywashere »

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…

This is the kind of comment I come to HN for. That's a powerful insight on work estimation.

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

#63

Post by kypro »

hot_gril wrote: post #50
chubot wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was also echoing through my brain while reading through the comment (worked there awhile ago) It would be crazy if someone just shook up the whole company top to bottom, but google is still making money and apple wasn’t So I think it will never happen

Good point, it's not a good comparison. > it will never happen I can see it happening. They have just one cash cow in advertising, and it's not terribly secure. TikTok is already a serious threat to YouTube. If this became a crisis, it wouldn't sink the company, but it'd certainly shake it up.

The "TikTok threat" is so overblown. It's not activity competing with any existing social or video platform. It's competing for time, but that's about it. No one is using TikTok to stay in touch with their Grandmother or watching 2 hour Podcasts on it. They invented a new type of video entertainment which has a social element, that's it - it's neither a YouTube or a social network competitor.

I'd argue Snapchat is probably their most direct competitor, but Snapchat's DAU is still growing fine, because even in Snapchat's case I think you can argue they're used differently. Snapchat seems to be used primarily to stay in touch with friends where as TikTok seems to be used to find/share short-form video content with strangers.

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

#64

Post by sgt »

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…

I think there is a lot of interest in your stories, if you would be willing to write them down and post them back to HN.

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

#65

Post by gorjusborg »

n4bz0r wrote: post #46
baby wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you look at in engineering culture?

I would assume there is no one thing to put a finger on. But there are some signs one can take a note of. Generally speaking, to name a few: - The ability and willingness of the management to invest time and resources into development of proper work processes and infrustructure (imagine having to code without version control in a team) - Understanding that things aren't always done the moment they appear to be done -…

> It comes down to understanding the nuances, and mutual respect, I think?

I think that's a great summary.

Look out for companies that try to manage what they don't understand. It can lead to the 'car mechanic phenomenon'. I call it that because it's like the feeling some get when they get the bill from the car mechanic. They can't fix it themselves, so how do they know if someone's pulling one over on them?

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

#66

Post by tester756 »

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…

That's 36 classes per *day* (900/250 workdays)

I don't know how many people were working on that

but when developing standard library you do not really want to rush designs. You want to be very, very careful about it.

Here's a book about it from one of the most experienced people in API/Standard lib design on the planet

https://www.amazon.com/Framework-Design-Guidelines-Conventio...

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

#67

Post by gorjusborg »

streblo wrote: post #32
Aperocky wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy, Ask where the documentation is. Ask how much input engineers have on what they are working on. Ask how many meetings hours they average per day.

> Ask where the documentation is. I've had a reasonably long career and worked at a number of companies at this point, and I've never seen this 'documentation' that engineers are supposedly producing.

I think existence of documentation is a poor metric, personally.

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

#68

Post by Communitivity »

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…

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 and some other quirks.

The problem space I've been in has issues with GC, so C++ or Rust are the main choices there (Go too, but not my preference).

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

#69

Post by StevePerkins »

tester756 wrote: post #66
StevePerkins wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's 36 classes per *day* (900/250 workdays) I don't know how many people were working on that but when developing standard library you do not really want to rush designs. You want to be very, very careful about it. Here's a book about it from one of the most experienced people in API/Standard lib design on the planet https://www.amazon.com/Framework-Design-Guidelines-Conventio...

I can't speak for grandparent commenter. However, I can point out that the standard library for Java 17 has a TOTAL of 4,388 classes. TODAY. A quarter-century after the timeframe that they're talking about:

https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/allclasse...

So if ~10k classes were really written in a year, then I can only assume that most of that was the compiler or virtual machine runtime (i.e. C++ code) rather than the standard library Java code.

Regardless of how anyone feels about "verbosity" or "design patterns" in Java application code, the underlying JDK is pretty inarguably one of the most solid and impressive pieces of tech ever developed. I'm not throwing any rocks at that codebase.

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

#70

Post by tester756 »

StevePerkins wrote: post #69
tester756 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's 36 classes per *day* (900/250 workdays) I don't know how many people were working on that but when developing standard library you do not really want to rush designs. You want to be very, very careful about it. Here's a book about it from one of the most experienced people in API/Standard lib design on the planet https://www.amazon.com/Framework-Design-Guidelines-Conventio...

I can't speak for grandparent commenter. However, I can point out that the standard library for Java 17 has a TOTAL of 4,388 classes. TODAY. A quarter-century after the timeframe that they're talking about: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/allclasse... So if ~10k classes were really written in a year, then I can only assume that most of that was the compiler or virtual machine runtime (i.e. C++ code…

>the underlying JDK is pretty inarguably one of the most solid and impressive pieces of tech ever developed.

I agree, JVM is impressive.

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