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“I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

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Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

#71

Post by mkramlich »

ryandrake wrote: post #46
consultant23522 wrote: post #38

I had a manager that would repeatedly use this type of remark. We had this particular application that on one could touch without breaking something. It was always a mess. He would often remark "I wrote the whole thing over a weekend, why can't you guys make a tiny little change without breaking it?" One day I finally got fed up with him and replied "Because it's the quality of work you'd expect from an entire applic…

I once worked with a founder who would always pull that kind of garbage: "I wrote [simple software with no dependencies or integration requirements] in [N] days! Why is it taking you guys [M] months to write [complex software relying on several 1st and 3rd party libraries, a component that needs to work within a large, old legacy system]? Good on the develop manager!

Also I've generally found it's easier to develop starting with a blank directory tree (no code), than to inherit a legacy codebase, have to make the sometimes grueling time/energy/focus/trial-and-error investment needed to come up to speed on it, understanding-wise, at the fine-grained level of detail you need to code confidently, then, figure out how to make a positive change that doesn't make some other thing worse. (And it's harder if no automated tests or documented manual test plan.) I call it OPC for Other People's Code. One of the anti-patterns of software engineering. It's distinct from NIH (Not Invented Here), which is another anti-pattern.

Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

#72

Post by cpr »

virtualwhys wrote: post #24

From 12BitSlab in article's comments > I don't mind if billg gets a little arrogant at times. One merely has to look at how he wrote the ROM code for the Altair to realize his abilities. > Also, ALL of the concepts embodied in modern tablets and smartphones were "invented" by billg when he wrote the code for the Tandy 100. Things like "instant on", data stored in non-volitile memory, small productivity apps, continue…

When I was an undergrad (a year ahead of Gates, 72-76), Harvard had only "intro to programming" undergrad courses, so those of us CS (well, applied math) majors who arrived at college already competent at programming pretty much just took all grad CS courses for 4 years. The faculty were enlightened enough not to care that we weren't grad students.

Gates was certainly one of the brighter undergrads in those courses. I don't know if that makes him a "CS giant," but he was no slouch.

Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

#73

Post by hackula1 »

tmister wrote: post #19

Gates is one of those rare people who is at a time a good developer, good manager and a cunning businessman. I started to appreciate him after watching Triumph of the Nerds documentary series. I literally loled for 5 minutes after watching Gates in an event parodying IBM which was organised by Jobs http://youtu.be/riyAe4BKAng?t=20m1s .

Wow, Larry Ellison predicts mobile web at 47:00.

Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

#74

Post by IgorPartola »

teawrecks wrote: post #67

Am I the only one who didn't interpret the quote as him showing off? If I used that line, it would be a way of telling them that the problem of segment tuning is an artificial limitation imposed by a format that hasn't gotten enough attention. "I wrote FAT on an airplane" would be my way of saying, "don't come up with better ways to work around my half-assed implementation. spend time improving the implementation so…

FAT and segment loading have nothing to do with each other. Gates was just bragging about having written something complex in a short period of time.

Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

#75

Post by derekp7 »

jussij wrote: post #64
troyk wrote: post #10

I'm old enough to know he didn't carry a computer on the plane....

Pen and paper works just fine on a plane and I'm old enough to know that back in those days lots of coding was done that way. At one work place, I spent most of the day away from the computer (terminal) waiting for the operational boys to get their stuff done. I would spend most of my coding day scribbling out code changes onto the fanfold printout.

And today quite a few people complain about having to code on a whiteboard while at a job interview. How times have changed.

Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

#76

Post by RockyMcNuts »

protomyth wrote: post #70
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was Paul Allen, if I remember correctly.

I'm pretty sure it was Bill Gates (although Paul Allen could of too). I thought the source was a Chaos Manor column back in the day.

nah... they decided Paul should go because Bill still looked like he was a high school sophomore.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/09/walter-isaacson-on-bill-g...

Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

#77

Post by Tloewald »

nknighthb wrote: post #13
troyk wrote: post #10

I'm old enough to know he didn't carry a computer on the plane....

But too young to know writing code and speccing data structures on paper (and/or napkins...) was quite common before airplane-friendly computers were available? (And for a long time after, really; ubiquitous ownership of laptops is a quite recent thing).

For that matter, pocket calculators programmable in BASIC started becoming quite inexpensive in the mid-80s.

Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

#78

Post by Tloewald »

virtualwhys wrote: post #24

From 12BitSlab in article's comments > I don't mind if billg gets a little arrogant at times. One merely has to look at how he wrote the ROM code for the Altair to realize his abilities. > Also, ALL of the concepts embodied in modern tablets and smartphones were "invented" by billg when he wrote the code for the Tandy 100. Things like "instant on", data stored in non-volitile memory, small productivity apps, continue…

You should look at the 16-bit VM Woz wrote for the Apple ][

http://www.6502.org/source/interpreters/sweet16.htm

Anyway, Engelbart, et al, had figured out all this stuff 10 years earlier.

Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

#79

Post by Tloewald »

YooLi wrote: post #9
danso wrote: post #8

So the FAT story may be an exaggeration, but does Brandon Eich's Javascript-in-10-days ( http://www.quora.com/JavaScript/In-which-10-days-of-May-did-... ) still count as a "STFU-I'm-the-boss" feat?

So that explains it... ;)

How do we explain C++?

Re: “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven's sake”

#80

Post by ars »

mrmaddog wrote: post #25
DenisM wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another possible conclusion from your analysis is that a proper architectural separation of concerns (which could allow one to bang out code like he's still on that plane) has not been practiced in Windows, and by the time Bill was offered the opportunity to code something in Windows it was already hopelessly entangled.

Not exactly. I am a huge fan of code modularization, but what modularization offers you is the ability to decrease the exponent (i.e. to be devTime^1.01 instead of devTime^2). Some features though (including segment tuning, from the sound of it), will touch a ton of other features regardless of how well you modularize your code. I work at a networking company (Arista), and a lot of the interesting problems come from…

> I am a huge fan of code modularization

These days that's no problem. But back then computers were slower and memory much tighter. Making clean interfaces to integrate things made the code too slow and large.

On the other hand, projects were smaller, so there was less need.

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