An Interview with Andy Hertzfeld | Hacker News Reader

An Interview with Andy Hertzfeld

notion.so

158 pointsstate29 comments

I liked this quote - "I think the essential way to do anything great, you have to have some incremental development philosophy because you're just going to be wrong with your grand design that you don't iterate on."

"Almost always, each step I take tells me what the next step should be." (also from the video)

You're not really doing something very revolutionary if you're not running into some dead ends.

You don't have a clear idea of what it's going to be when you start, you have an inkling and then, each step tells you what the next step is but you don't know what the next step is until you've gotten to a certain point.

We thought we were making an exquisite product, the best possible thing at the time but then, we figured, in a few years we'd make something a lot better, completely different. We didn't realize the architecture we were putting in place could last five years, let alone 10, 20, 30 years.

I think the essential way to do anything great, you have to have some incremental development philosophy because you're just going to be wrong with your grand design that you don't iterate on.

Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup ;)

Telescript is still something that intuitively seems like a good idea for a certain class of problem. In some ways, while it's a bit of a stretch, I would argue that Map/Reduce is a different encoding of this idea -- that the code should be mobile because the data isn't. Clearly Java was inspired by this concept and has been quite successful, but people aren't running applets for the most part anymore, so the one of the fundamental ideas motivating Java turned out to be irrelevant to its success. And yet on the other hand we have ReactNative and its equivalents sending JavaScript code off to the computers in our pockets. Even GMail and the original AJAX concepts are a re-creation of the Telescript concepts.

I hope Andy realizes that this idea isn't wrong so much as it was bad timing (like the rest of what General Magic was doing). The world today has transposed the ideas, but they're still recognizable in very successful platforms with significant mindshare.

Yes, agreed: I think he was being way too modest. It didn't turn out exactly like they expected, but they were right about the important things, and we still have a LONG way to go, so comparing their vision with the crap we have now just isn't fair. I think time will prove them right (but wrong about being wrong ;).

>Telescript is still something that intuitively seems like a good idea for a certain class of problem.

It has been available in other forms -- e.g. Distributed Smalltalk ( https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/170223/ ).

Andy is the principal author of the posts on https://www.folklore.org/ , which is all about the development of the mac. Definitely worth going through in an afternoon, if you're interested in that era.

Another useful website on the same vein is "The Long View"

http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...

Contains histories about Photoshop, Object Pascal, A/UX, MCL, and many other Apple technologies.

An iWeb site! I didn't end up using it much, but i still find it the most intuitive, simple and true WYSIWYG full site making tool regardless of platform. Too bad Apple discontinued it (although it still works in modern macOS, i wonder for how long though), there are some alternatives but every single one i've seen either scales down the WYISWYG part or scales up the complexity - or both.

man, folklore.org was an amazing find when I went through university.

I was fully convinced all those late nights at the lab meant I was doing something horribly wrong the whole time. Reading about all the trial and failure that the Mac team went though really set everything into perspective.

I really wish more groundbreaking projects cut through the mythology behind them, the sharp edges where the teams bled through aren't always shown. I really enjoy works where this stuff comes through, works like "The Soul of New Machine" and the like capture the hard parts...

My question for developers and engineers (on HN) today is this.

Do you think that people like Hertzfeld, Atkinson, Wozniak etc were super special in the way they are portrayed? Or were they simply around at a time when there was little competition in terms of competition? (Not saying they don't have talent just is it godlike?

I am reminded of what I thought was 'smart' based on people in my own local school. Then you get out in the world and you realize there are so many people that probably have much more ability, drive etc and they appear to far exceed what I thought was 'great'.

I think about this any time I see a field that is sparsely populated. Things like fighting wild fires or observing things in Antartica. Not like there are hundreds of thousands of people doing that but then from that small group you end up with 'experts'. (And maybe they are but usually a larger number would yield more qualified 'experts', right?)

I think it's both: right place at the right time, but so were a lot of other people. Some rose above the rest.

Woz was a hobbyist at a time when a hobbyist could get his hobby mainstream. There was only a year at most when you could do that with the "home computer".

I love Notion, and I also love that they hosted this interview. Great interview.

Yeah, Notion is far and above the best productivity workspace tool I've found, and I've tried most of them.

Jealous I didn't build it myself -- I think it's going to be huge in the near future.

Absolutely agreed, and I think they well-deserve their fame. It's hard to do well in this competitive space.

I disagree that history proves them wrong about Telescript. They just had the client/server relationship backwards (and asymmetrical).

Andy Hertzfeld: "You didn't really need to do that. Just the remote procedure paradigm was good enough. Which is really what the web is based on. You don't inject code into the web to do you work for you and come back to you. You just ask a server with an http request."

It doesn't take Yakov Smirnoff to observe that now the web injects code into you.

The remote procedure paradigm isn't good enough. That just leads to the X-Windows Disaster.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39...

I'll argue that injecting code both ways is quite useful and extremely powerful.

Whenever you add a script or extension to Google Sheets or Google Docs or Gmail, you're injecting JavaScript code into a server running in the cloud.

Here's another example of how clients can inject code into servers: NFS 3.0 aka NeFS was a proposed version of NFS that put a PostScript interpreter into the kernel, so you could download code into your file server to efficiently perform file system operations, minimizing network traffic and even eliminating context switching.

http://donhopkins.com/home/nfs3_0.pdf

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9271578

>You might get a kick out of Sun's proposal for "NFS 3.0" aka "NeFS". The basic idea was to put a PostScript interpreter in the kernel for extensibly and efficiently executing distributed and even local file system operations. It not only cuts down on network transactions for the same reason NeWS and AJAX does, but even locally you can avoid billions of context switches by executing "find" and tasks like that in the kernel, for example.

NeFS was a great idea, but too radical for its time (Feb. 1990, soon before Telescript), but people are finally starting to rediscover the technique with other languages like JavaScript and Java.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7958194

>Runtime.JS – Operating system kernel built on V8 (runtimejs.org)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060395

>pjmlp 55 days ago | on: Extending Tcl

>Yes, Sun played with idea of putting a JVM on the Solaris kernel.

>DonHopkins 55 days ago

>Even 16 or so years earlier in 1990, Sun played with the idea of putting a PostScript interpreter in the SunOS kernel.

>Like NeWS was the Network extensible Window System, so NeFS was the Network extensible File System, or NFS 3.0.

>It was actually a great idea, just a wee bit before its time, and very poorly named and positioned!

>This comparison of NeWS to AJAX also applies NeFS, which is like kernel NeWS with file operations instead of a graphics library -- it also saves you lots of user/kernel context switches even if you're not doing any networking:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

>NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently:

>- used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming.

>- used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering.

>- used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation.

>It didn't go over very well because the unenlightened philistines of the time couldn't get their head around an API to the file system that wasn't compatible with creat open close read write and ioctl.

Pardon me for the off topic reply, but I don't see your contact info anywhere so will post it here:

The "recent posts" link at your website throws a lot of "Illegal string offset" warnings at the start of the page.

I haven't heard him mentioned in a long time. What did he do after the Mac?

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Hertzfeld ...

Since leaving Apple, he has co-founded three companies: Radius in 1986, General Magic in 1990, and Eazel in 1999. In 2002, he helped Mitch Kapor promote open source software with the Open Source Applications Foundation. Hertzfeld worked at Google from 2005 to 2013, where in 2011 he was the key designer of the Circles user interface in Google+.

It makes me think: I wonder if Google has become the place where famous people go to...not do much. Like, they just sequester geniuses, like so much carbon. Shiny carbon status symbols.

Google did that to a big chunk of the cutting-edge robotics industry. In 2013, they acquired a bunch of robotics companies. Most of them were never heard from again. Ones that had customers, such as Bot and Dolly, were shut down. For several years, many people thought Google had some big secret project in the works. No. They were going nowhere. Now they've sold many of the companies off to Softbank in Japan.

>Ones that had customers, such as Bot and Dolly, were shut down. For several years, many people thought Google had some big secret project in the works.

That works wonders to inflate Google's stock too (on such vague promises of future tech), way beyond they ever spent on them.

>I wonder if Google has become the place where famous people go to...not do much

They don't have to do much. If they just have 1-2 major insights per year, or help teams make the right decisions because of their experience, that's enough to justify millions in salary -- even if they don't write code or project manage themselves but just sit on their office playing Pong and waiting for someone to ask them a question.

A lot of big companies do that.

Two examples i can think of: The guy who made Tetris ended up working at Microsoft for the Xbox team, and I think Matz works for Rakuten in Japan? - might just an honorary position.

The Circles interface was good though, it was even adapted in an (IMO inferior) form by Facebook. Its main issue was that it was made for Google+ that nobody wanted to use.

Even so, the brief summary hinted that he probably did more during an earlier 8-year stretch than at Google.

Andy Hertzfeld is such a nice guy who worked on a lot of amazing things, and who gives proper credit where it's due:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AndyHertzfeld/posts/FddaP6jeCqp

>Andy Hertzfeld, Public, July 1, 2011

>It's great that the user experience of Google Plus is being so well received, and I'm happy about all the positive feedback that's been coming my way, but I'm worried that I'm getting too much credit for it, so this long-winded post is an attempt to set the record straight.

>I am indeed the main individual behind the interaction design and implementation of the circle editor. I conceived, designed and implemented a compelling prototype for it almost single-handedly, and then wrote a fair percentage of the production javascript code with lots of help from my friends. I also worked on a couple of other parts of the product a little bit, but that's pretty much as far as it goes.

>Steven Levy's excellent Wired article got the story right - I wrote the circle editor and then recently widened my focus to the overall Google Plus user experience. But subsequent stories jumped to the conclusion that I was responsible for the design of the entire product that we launched on Tuesday, which isn't true, but I guess it was just too good a story (about Apple design values infecting Google) for people to resist. And now some people are saying that I'm responsible for the broad visual refresh now rolling out across Google, which couldn't be further from the truth - in fact, I'm not even sure I like it.

>One thing that I learned during the launch of the original Macintosh in 1984 was that the press usually oversimplifies everything, and it can't deal with the reality that there are many people playing critical roles on significant projects. A few people always get too much credit, while most people get too little, that's just the way it has always worked. But luckily, it's 2011 and I can use the service that I helped to create to clarify things.

>+Shaun Modi is the awesome young designer most responsible for the visual design of the circle editor, especially the blooming circles, along with +Jonathan Terleski, who helped refine it after Shaun departed. +Joseph Smarr also helped with the design quite a bit, and was especially valuable as someone I could rely on (along with Jonathan) to tell me when a particular aspect was good enough yet or not.

>Google probably won't be thrilled about me mentioning the names of the superb developers who helped me with the circle editor code (hello recruiters) but I feel that I must mention my main collaborators here: +Owen Prater +Eric Cattell +Eric W. Barndollar and +Griff Hazen, along with Ariel Gertzenstein and Rich Conlan who helped in the early stages. And those are just the main front-end guys, there are plenty of others who worked on the shared infrastructure or the back-end that I won't mention.

>And all of the above are just the people who helped with the circle editor and related UI. There are plenty of others who worked on the stream, profiles and photos, as well as the leadership, product managers and various specialists who also made invaluable contributions every day. Suffice it to say that Google Plus is the creation of large, talented team that I'm proud to be a part of, and anyway it's only the beginning, we're all excited about what it has a chance to become over the months and years ahead.

I wonder if Google made him go through their regular interview process?

Sibling comment mentioned mentioned OSAF. Recently I read Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg, which is a chronicle of the fun technical debt (mis)adventures that the OSAF had with Chandler, with some appearances by Hertzfeld.

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