Paul Graham : uses this.
paul.graham.usesthis.com
paul.graham.usesthis.com
> I'd like it if the HD display was bigger and much lighter and didn't have such a massive octopus of cables attached to it.
Looks like Apple agreed. The more recent Apple displays are bigger and have mostly eliminated the “octopus of cables” (when LightPeak hits this should even further improve), and the new Air is substantially smaller.
When I got done reading the "What hardware are you using?" section I laughed at the heading of the "What would be your dream setup?" section.
Another windows sighting. And the most fascinating of the interviews I've read.
Dream setup? This is it!
Incredible!
So he uses Windows and Mac OS for platform-specific builds, but Linux day-to-day.
(okay, let's be reasonable, the build machine should be stupid fast so nobody is sitting around for half a day while the repository builds).
I guess it also depends on what you're building. I mostly work on stuff that isn't used by a consumer. It's going to run as a service on a machine or network of machines far more powerful than my PC. I imagine most people developing for consumers though are building websites or mobile apps. Mobile apps should be tested on a variety of devices, and it would take a pretty intense website to start bogging down most people's machines I imagine.
> it would take a pretty intense website to start bogging down
> most people's machines I imagine.
> which still isn't insignificant
I'm not sure if this was serious or not.
Probably worth mentioning that this post was done way before Steam and many Source games came out for OSX publicly.
The main thing is to have a process more than a single particular setup. I've tried all sorts of home-built systems, including water cooled, phase change, etc... The conclusion I've reached is that upgrading every 6 months is more important than trying to get the fastest possible system at one point of time. The time and energy I used to spend optimizing my hardware I now spend making sure it's easy to swap out my current machine for a new machine with the least downtime.
Not so much from the perspective of constant hardware upgrades, but from the perspective of being able to translocate and go (and, presumably, also back up an entire environment as easily).
That said, i'm getting tired of my T500 already. I don't see myself really needing expresscard as much as I was bent on it.
Overall, I've learned that ergonomics matters at the end of the day no matter what machine you use - meaning I care less about laptop screen size and more about bang for the battery life. I can't convince myself to buy a desktop either, so I'm considering getting a 13-14 inch laptop with the fastest processor, ssd, and gobs of ram instead.
"My current desktop system is a Windows 7 64-bit 8-core machine"
Although to be fair, he also says it "changes practically every week."
I'm still sad to see some of these people (including pg) use such antiquated tools. I use vi on a daily basis but just for very small text files, you can be so much more productive with more modern tools these days.
I'm more productive and make much better-looking documents with emacs+xetex than with Word. YMMV.
[ keep in mind that 'mature' != 'old' ]
- The original 'vi' editor
- The entire 'vi collection.' By that I mean vi + clones (i.e. vi, vim, elvis, etc).
- The Vim editor (being the most popular vi clone)
I'm never sure which people mean (though they usually just mean Vim), and I've come across many people that are confused (especially if they aren't too familiar with the Unix/Linux ecosystem and/or are Emacs users) but the inter-changeable usage of terms.
I can't see how this is a good counter-argument either. They still do work, they run on renewable fuel, growing the fuel can be enhanced by the waste products of the horse. They're relatively low maintenance, the motor can be interchanged and easily used to drive other machines. Certainly at city driving speeds the buggy is going to compete quite well.
Yes a car or other automobile is going to outperform a horse & buggy in many situations but there are other aspects that are wins for the horse & buggy.
I'd be interested to see a running cost and efficiency comparison, shoeing horses is probably quite expensive nowadays with the dearth of blacksmiths/farriers.
If there was ever a sentence more finely crafted to stoke a religious editor war, I sure haven't seen it!
(Given the choice I would do my day to day job on a Mac.)
Citation needed.
My primary operating system has been Linux for the last decade. I don't think that I'm that unusual.
I use vi on a daily basis but just for very small text files, you can be so much more productive with more modern tools these days.
Well, yes; vim.
Well that would be the iPad. This is from 2009, I wonder what pg thinks of the iPad regarding this quote. Really makes you notice how fast things change in a year nowadays.
Interviews are supposed to give a reflection of a person, their thinking process or get an insider scoop. Nothing here.
EDIT: Sorry people, just saw that interview aimed to know the tools he used to get things done. So my bad!
Personally, however, I found that quite disappointing. :( Reading through the list of people and what they had to say I'm thinking, "man, I wonder if that was a random choice, or something that person spent a lot of time thinking about". Maybe I'm weird, but just knowing that someone who's work I admire has a Compaq Concerto isn't interesting if I don't understand the tradeoffs that went into its purchase.
Another complaint I have is that the site attempts what I believe to be a strong and artificial separation between hardware and software, and even requires a fixed ordering: hardware first, software second.
In my experience, software and hardware are really two different physical manifestations of the same underlying concepts (maybe I've spent way too much time on projects that involved writing software to accomplish the same goal as a previous generation's fixed function hardware), and end up having dependency relationships that criss-cross the supposed boundary.
As an example, many people interviewed on the site mentioned that they own a MacBook only because they were recently doing a lot of iPhone development and needed to use Apple's iOS SDK. However, it led to awkward phrasing to do that in the hardware section (before they had a chance to go more in depth into the software later), so the comment is stilted at the top and then short changed later (as it was already mentioned earlier).
It is also quite common, however, for people to first look at physical device properties like form factor, screen size, or input subsystem, leading them to make decisions that sound like "once I decided I had to have a netbook, I started evaluating whether to run Debian or Windows 7: either would be fine as I really only needed to run Chrome and a terminal".
I therefore look at this website as a giant list of missed opportunities to learn something really interesting and important about a number of really awesome people, and while I again agree: the site accomplished its stated goal, I think it is appropriate to judge a site on whether the underlying concept was appropriate in addition to whether they succeeded at their implementation.
The specific hardware and software I use to do my work is something I have spent a lot of explicit time thinking about, both alone and with the people I work with (we have spent so much time bickering over what the absolute best keyboard in the world is it would sicken many people), and I simply do not see a way to make these stories insightful or compelling with the constraint of explicitly discussing hardware first and software second. :(
A final comment: I did not say that they aren't doing anything right. I stated quite explicitly that I "personally" felt there were other interesting goals that were being left aside, and I will say that apparently some other people agree with me or we would not have seen the couple comments in this thread that led me to decide to post something to expand on the thought. Please do not assume that people expressing their personal opinions about something implies that that they believe that thing has no value to anyone.
(Not saying that pg does it that way. For all I know, he might just use vi and mzscheme after all)
The good ones include historical context and explanation of the setup decisions, this is just a list.
I just finished reading "Coders at Work". An I 'used' this would make an interesting site as well. Especially if there were pics of some of those old machines. I borrowed a unix book from a friend and he had been using an old punchcard as a bookmark. Neat little find.
edit: Look, I'm not dissing the man. His eyes are angelically beautiful. I must admit, probably not an insight into what tools he uses, but I just hadn't noticed before.
Not vim? Not MacVim? You ssh to a server and use vanilla vi?
A
B
D
D
C
<esc>
:q!
$ echo "alias vi=vim" >> ~/.bashrcHowever, there is nothing stopping you from publishing your own version on your own site. Or bribing with @waferbaby with yummy vegan treats.
Oxymoron, fellow weekend warrior. Butter must be included. However, it is not an element in the periodic table of deliciousness--because it is so fundamental it is the up-quark of baking.
Then again, I didn't downvote you, so...