Peter Seibel - Coders at Work - Reflections on the craft of programming

Seibel:And did you give them a free rein? You tell them you want X, Y, and Z and then they get to figure out how to do it?

Zawinski:Yeah. If I’m trying to decide whether to include this module in the thing that I’m going to ship, I’m going to have requirements about it. Does the damn thing work is really the bottom line there. So I would give them advice on, “I think you’re going to have better luck if you try it this rather than this way.” But I wanted it to work and I wanted to not have to be the one to write it. If they wanted to go do it in some crazy way but it worked, that was OK because that gave me point two: I didn’t have to write it. But mostly the feedback I was giving them was just, does it work and does it make sense.

Seibel:On the flip side, when you were the less-experienced programmer, what did your mentors do that was helpful?

Zawinski:I guess the most important thing is they’d recognize when it was time to level up. When I went to work for Fahlman I was given some silly little busy work. And eventually got given tasks that were a little more significant—not that they were significant at all really.

Seibel:I think you talked about Rob MacLachlan, who just hovered and said, “Wrong!” Was that balanced, perhaps, by someone else who was a little more nurturing?

Zawinski:Well, he wasn’t completely a cave man. He would actually tell me things, too. I know I ended up doing a lot of reading of code and asking questions. I think one thing that’s really important is to not be afraid of your ignorance. If you don’t understand how something works, ask someone who does. A lot of people are skittish about that. And that doesn’t help anybody. Not knowing something doesn’t mean you’re dumb—it just means you don’t know it yet.

Seibel:Did you read code mostly because it was something you were working on, or was it just something you wanted to know how it worked?

Zawinski:Yeah. Just poking around—“I wonder how that works.” The impulse to take things apart is a big part of what gets people into this line of work.

Seibel:Were you actually one of those kids who took toasters apart?

Zawinski:Yeah. I made a telephone and learned how to dial with a telegraph tapper that I made out of a tin can. When I was little I had these old books I got at a garage sale or something, like Boy’s Own Science Book from the ’30s, and I remember getting a really big kick out of those. That was really hacker culture in the ’20s and ’30s where they’re showing how to wire up a telegraph between your room and the barn and how to make Leyden jars.

Seibel:That brings me to another of my standard questions: do you, as a programmer, think of yourself as a scientist or an engineer or an artist or a craftsman or something else?

Zawinski:Well, definitely not a scientist or engineer because those have very formal connotations. I don’t do a lot of math; I don’t draw blueprints; I don’t prove things. I guess somewhere between craftsman and artist, depending on what the project is. I write a lot of screen savers—that’s not craftsman; that’s making pretty pictures. Somewhere in that area.

Seibel:Do you feel like you taught yourself computer science or did you just learn to program?

Zawinski:Well, I certainly picked up a bunch of computer science over the years. But learning to program was the goal. Making the machine do something was the goal and the computer-science side of it was a means to an end.

Seibel:Did you ever feel that as a lack—did you ever wish you had been exposed to things in a more systematic way?

Zawinski:There were definitely times, especially at Lucid, where it’d be obvious that there’s this whole big black hole that these guys are talking about that I just completely missed because I never needed to know it. And then I’d pick up the terminology and have a basic idea what they’re talking about and maybe do a little bit of reading on it if it was something I needed to know. So there were definitely times, especially early on, where I felt like, “Oh my god, I don’t know anything.” It would just be embarrassing—but that was just being insecure. Being the young kid around all these people with PhDs—“Aaah, I don’t know anything! I’m an idiot! How did I bluff my way into this?”

Though my life certainly would have turned out very differently if I had spent a lot more time in school—it was a moment in time when I got to do the things I did.

Seibel:Did you ever feel the opposite, where you felt like the computer scientists around you just didn’t understand actual programming as well as you did?

Zawinski:I felt like that a lot, but really that’s not so much about thinking, “Wow, you guys have been barking up the wrong tree.” as, “Wow, we’re just not interested in the same things.” I don’t want to be a mathematician but I’m not going to criticize someone who is a mathematician.

It’s weird that people often confuse those two pursuits. People who are into very theoretical computer science are thought of in this same way as people who are shipping desktop applications. And they don’t really have a lot to do with each other.

Seibel:You’re largely self-taught. Do you have any advice for selftaught programmers?

Zawinski:That’s a really hard question because the world’s so different now. I always feel weird talking about, “Here’s what I did.” I don’t know if that was the right way to do it. But people always hear it as, “Be like me.”

I stumbled into this—it all just sort of happened. I made some decisions and they led to others and here we are.

Every now and then I get an email from someone that’s basically, “I want to be a programmer; what do I do?” Or, “Should I go to college or not?” How can I answer that? I would have had very strong opinions about this if you asked me in 1986. But someone today couldn’t take the same path that I took because that path doesn’t even exist anymore.

Ten years ago I would have said absolutely the first thing you have to do is learn assembly language. You have to learn how the machine actually works. Does that matter any more? I don’t even know. Maybe it does. But possibly not. If the way software is going to be ten years from now is all web applications or a piece of distributed code in some rented computing cluster that’s moving around between a dozen different Google servers and spawning other copies of itself and then merging back together once it’s got results, does anyone need to know assembly language any more? Is that so abstracted away that it doesn’t matter? I don’t know.

I was kind of freaked out when I realized that there are people graduating with CS degrees who’d never written C. They started in Java and they stayed there. That just seemed bizarre and wrong. But I don’t know. Maybe it’s not wrong. Maybe that’s the caveman thoughts: “Back in my day, we programmed with a nine-volt battery and a steady hand!”

Seibel:What about books? Are there particular computer-science or programming books that everyone should read?

Zawinski:I actually haven’t read very many of those. The one I always recommend is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs , which a lot of people are afraid of because it’s Lispy, but I think does a really good job of teaching programming without teaching a language. I think a lot of introductory-level stuff focuses on syntax and I definitely saw that in the classes I had in high school and in the intro classes at Carnegie-Mellon during my brief time there.