An interview with James Gosling : The Setup | Hacker News Reader

An interview with James Gosling : The Setup

james.gosling.usesthis.com

70 pointspetercooper42 comments

I initially found it surprising that most of the professionals interviewed for The Setup use less than a dozen applications on a regular basis. I hoped to learn about some interesting tools used by others, but it was mostly a standard setup consisting of a terminal, web browser, and editor.

That made me think, so I started to analyze my own setup and realized that it's actually very similar. I spend most of my time in just a few applications regardless of a platform. I also noticed that initially I'm very excited about apps that are designed for a specific task (eg. a dedicated GTD tool) but in time I tend to gravitate towards more generic solutions (eg. a plain-text file edited with Vim). The same also applies to web and mobile applications.

That makes me wonder, do we actually need millions of apps if people don't use them in the long run? Don't we spend too much effort on playing with tools? How does it affect startups?

> it was mostly a standard setup consisting of a terminal, web browser, and editor

That's because anything that matters in software development can be accessed through a terminal, through a browser (docs, mailing lists) or through your preferred editor.

It says little about what you're actually using.

Also, software development is fucking hard anyway, and by using too many tools you're passing this threshold where any productivity gains are lost in the learning process associated with picking up new technology.

do we actually need millions of apps if people don't use them[?]

If you buy into the 80-20 rule, then yes, probably we do. Much of the software the interviewees use is stuff I use too, but where we don't overlap is where it gets interesting.

"I do most of my programming in NetBeans, although I use vi a fair amount."

Is this like a joke? The guy wrote one of the first Emacses... I am disappoint.

And Sussman switched to python. Religious wars are for followers, not Creators.

Ah, the sweet irony of needless capitalization in this context…

Sorry but do you have sources to back up your assertion?

I took a class with Prof. Sussman, and even worked as an undergraduate researcher for a summer, and I know for a fact that his current work is still being done in MIT Scheme. The classes that he teaches currently Adventures in Symbolic programming, and Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics are also in MIT Scheme.

Finally, when I asked him about his opinion on Python and he put it this way "they wanted to have a language that they could use everywhere and also have it work with robots [describing the new intro to EECS course at MIT] so they picked Python."

So I strongly doubt the veracity of your statement. I think you're confusing MIT EECS department's switch to python in many classes as a sign that Prof. Sussman has personally switched to Python, which is very misleading.

No, just referencing a well-known event; but it seems you're right that he's not teaching that course any more http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=531490

However, he did say that starting off with python makes an undergraduate’s initial experiences maximally productive in the current environment. http://cemerick.com/2009/03/24/why-mit-now-uses-python-inste...

fun fact: norvig switched to python (for his textbook) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815

It's horses for courses (or ophidia for courses in this case).

Ok, but what is he using now? A more (easily) extensible, more flexible editor?

Or are the principles which have driven the design of Emacs not valid anymore? A C core with Lisp for the non-performance critical parts. That is modern, agile design right there.

No joke: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/207799/don_t_use_ema...

"During his keynote address at the Sydney leg of the Sun Tech Days worldwide developer conference, Gosling quizzed the audience by asking how many people "still use Emacs?"

"When a few dozen people raised their arms in support of the 30-year-old editor, Gosling said "just stop!", much to the amusement of the audience.

"In a former life I was responsible for the first version of Emacs on Unix [Gosling Emacs]," Gosling said. "Emacs was a really great idea in the seventies and one of the frightening things about Emacs today is if you skip the last 20 years it is much the same."

...

"Gosling recommended the diehard Emacs users take a look at Sun's NetBeans IDE, which "fits together" components well and there was "a lot of work done in the GUI editing" for the recent version 6 release."

Clearly he's just bitter because Emacs hasn't considered Java worth the effort of supporting well.

I asked him if he ever uses emacs now. His answer was mostly what nswanberg posted above/below. No more emacs.

BTW, on Clojure, he merely stated that he used up his lifetime's quota of parentheses while completing his Ph.D.

I was surprised when I learn pg was using vi instead of emacs, too.

I liked to two things

1. The guy has three kindles. I have one and I use it a lot. I'm not sure how or what I'd do with another two. One works perfectly.

2. His iPad lives in the bathroom and has replaced the magazine stack.

Brilliant

Maybe a bit unsanitary? I toss out old Economists after a few weeks, but an ipad is something that's just going to sit there.

I don't think that the iPad replaces every possible use of a stack of paper in a bathroom, just the reading part.

I actually find my ereader more sanitary than paper books since I can actually wash it however many times I want and it's really easy to clean.

Those two items are almost exactly my setup ;)

I have a Kindle DX for reading PDFs, white papers and other large reading format items. This mostly stays at home on my desk.

I have a small Kindle 3 which I use mostly for fiction, philosophy, and basically small form reading. This is what I take everywhere with me.

And I have a spare small Kindle 3 which my girl uses mostly. We started sharing our books long before the lend functionality appeared, and as she is not earning (full time PhD student) I was paying for the Kindle books anyway... so she just uses my account on a spare Kindle. She buys her own books for her PhD and just uses the Kindle for lighter reading.

As for the iPad I purchased... it resides in the bathroom and flipbook is used on it. Occasionally someone will bring it into the front room, but after a day it naturally seems to be put back in the bathroom.

I found the iPad so extremely limiting that it just isn't used in the household. The flash thing turns out to be a big deal for us, and you can only play so much Angry Birds. There's nothing we need it for so it's reduced itself to being a constantly up to date magazine to dip in and out of, and that's why it ends up being read on the loo or in the bath.

Re: the unsanitariness comment below... the iPad is in a case and you know, it's perfectly possible to clean a glass screen with more than just a smear removing cloth. Besides... if you think this is bad, just think of iPads in hospitals and pause to wonder how they will be sterilised.

The rest of my setup looks more like Tim Bray's: http://tim.bray.usesthis.com/

You should almost certainly eat more fiber if you are sitting long enough to want something to read.

For 1. I assume he has a family and they each have their own, though if so he should have been more clear about that.

Could be that he's bought multiple versions of the kindle - perhaps a v1, a DX, a v3 - and has no pressing reason to get rid of any.

>2. His iPad lives in the bathroom and has replaced the magazine stack.

This is a big deal. For me the iPad is, above all, a space saver. Now I don't have to waste a couple of walls in my office for books (in progress) or a room in the closet for board games. The more things I can get on there the less physical space I need.

I would be interested to know the typical use cases the HN crowd is finding for the iPad. I see it being used in the bathroom, the kitchen, and the living room as a remote. I don't really see many people dropping their laptops in favor of their iPad outside the home however. Do you see the tablet becoming an 'around the house' appliance or something else?

At last someone with a more messy setup than the usual stylish "big mac at work / smaller mac at home" interviewee. Thought I was the only one with too many computers (used and unused) at home.

This is an important comment for the string of UsesThis entries. I can almost guess what is going to be said on these and this one was a bit of fresh air.

My fiancee recently came up to me and asked me why there was a computer in a box under the bed, when I replied saying it was my first tandy and might run someday she just rolled her eyes.

It is nice to see there are some of us computer horders out there!

He wrote his own presentation software. I'd like to get my hands on a copy.

http://kenai.com/projects/huckster/. It's linked from the article.

doesn't look like there's a binary, just source. Still, shouldn't be that hard to build.

I love Keynote on the Mac, but I also love trying new software. I just tried to build it without success on Mac OS 10.6 using Ant 1.8.1. Any suggestions?

- I cloned the Mercurial repo (my first time with a VCS),

- I downloaded Ant [1], installed it [2], and successfully built a "Hello World" build.xml [3] (I have some experience in the command line),

- I ran

  ant -buildfile /Users/mattparcher/Huckster/build.xml

Producing:

  BUILD FAILED
  /Huckster/nbproject/build-impl.xml:351: The following error occurred while executing this line:
  /Huckster/nbproject/build-impl.xml:160: Compile failed; see the compiler error output for details.

[1] http://ant.apache.org

[2] http://www.asceticmonk.com/blog/?p=388

[3] http://www.andyjarrett.co.uk/blog/index.cfm/2007/6/27/Instal...

Figure out where the compiler output goes?

"In the closet I've got a home-built system that I use for network storage. It runs OpenSolaris and has 5 2Tb drives: mirrored with a hot spare for a total of 4Tb of usable storage."

Just curious, what would an individual need that much storage for? I ask because I'm living pretty comfortably with the 320Gb hard drive in my MBP. Is it digital photographs, or maybe raw video footage?

Some of my friends have archives of data going back to 15 years. You end up accumulating a lot of stuff that way.

Video...

Video, music, lots of software (e.g. ISOs).

Mind you it's also nice to have it redundant like he does.

Video, music and games?

Also digital photographs, I've got at least a few hundred gigabytes of unprocessed photos - I take thousands of photos per trip, and even my cellphone has an 8mp camera!.

Videos really fill a hard drive fast. Some sailing videos are in the gigabyte range for an hour of video.

Beats the hell out of my single laptop setup that gets lugged around everywhere I go

Why? I've come to appreciate having a single machine & not having to worry about syncing stuff between machines, maintaining multiple development environments, etc ... While I'm impressed by the sheer amount of hardware in his household, I know it'd be a nightmare for me.

Yea. I used to have a few machines and I spent more time fixing bugs due to the dev environments when switching machines, than writing code. One MacBook pro replaced the lot and I've never been happier.

Dropbox would be a viable solution for that though.

Based on the sheer amount of hardware in his house (and who James Gosling actually is), I don't see why he wouldn't be able to afford a premium account.

He uses Dropbox. I've seen the icon on his Macbook Pro :)

He's not going to be too pleased if Java isn't supported or maintained on Macs in future.

There's always a way. If Apple decided not to include a Java runtime with their operating system, that's fine. The important bit is that it will become easy to install.

I wouldn't mind setting up my new computer with a fresh OpenJDK (when/if this one becomes the de-facto JDK to use on OS X platform).

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