> Rob hates Bjarne Stroustrup
That sounds extreme. What did Bjarne do to him?
That sounds extreme. What did Bjarne do to him?
Seibel: You were at AT&T with Bjarne Stroustrup. Were you involved at all in the development of C++?
Thompson: I'm gonna get in trouble.
Seibel: That's fine.
Thompson: I would try out the language as it was being developed and make comments on it. It was part of the work atmosphere there. And you'd write something and then the next day it wouldn't work because the language changed. It was very unstable for a very long period of time. At some point I said, no, no more.
In an interview I said exactly that, that I didn't use it just because it wouldn't stay still for two days in a row. When Stroustrup read the interview he came screaming into my room about how I was undermining him and what I said mattered and I said it was a bad language. I never said it was a bad language. On and on and on. Since then I kind of avoid that kind of stuff.
Seibel: Can you say now whether you think it's a good or bad language?
Thompson: It certainly has its good points. But by and large I think it's a bad language. It does a lot of things half well and it's just a garbage heap of ideas that are mutually exclusive. Everybody I know, whether it's personal or corporate, selects a subset and these subsets are different. So it's not a good language to transport an algorithm—to say, “I wrote it; here, take it.” It's way too big, way too complex. And it's obviously built by a committee.
Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made to the language, to get it adopted and used. And he sort of ran all the standards committees with a whip and a chair. And he said “no” to no one. He put every feature in that language that ever existed. It wasn't cleanly designed—it was just the union of everything that came along. And I think it suffered drastically from that.
Seibel: Do you think that was just because he likes all ideas or was it a way to get the language adopted, by giving everyone what they wanted?
Thompson: I think it's more the latter than the former.
Professionalism and the tech industry are just starting to get acquainted.
For instance: ask a lawyer what they think about the overturning of Roe v Wade. Now ask them what they think about their colleagues who disagree. Don't forget to duck.
Which isn't to say that we wouldn't all be much better off with more distance between our opinions and our identities. But the thing you're looking for is a cultivated practice that is often not at odds with 'egotism' (what is that, precisely, anyway?) but _entailed by_ it: the not-wanting-to-be-the-kind-of-person-who-does-XYZ.
Not all vanities are risible.
What you're looking for is a long-cultivated, inward practice that can be supported or hindered by all the usual forces, local context (culture, practice, etc) chief among them.
Put another way: your claim isn't that most programmers are unprofessional. It's that they're _uncollegial_. And you're right. So are a lot of other contemporary professionals. It's a shouty era.
I've found that it's extraordinarily valuable to separate these two cognitive modes wherever possible.
As I read this while sipping my turmeric latte my monocle popped right out!
99% of [people], but especially the brilliant/well known ones [in any domain], are insufferable egotists.
IMHO this is normal. When somebody puts in a lot of effort in mastering something they intrinsically know that they are better than most people in that something. As social animals, getting "noticed" is a form of being conferred "status" in the group. Thus you tend to "act out" to acknowledge/confirm that recognition. It is fine as long as it is within acceptable social bounds and not out of touch with reality.