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Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

Thank you! My work laptop is a M4 Macbook Pro so I really appreciate the beauty of Rosetta. Thank you for the effort!

I just checked your LinkedIn and realized you joined Apple since 2009 (with one year of detour to Mozilla). You also graduated from Waterloo as a Pure Math Graduate student (I absolutely love Waterloo, the best Math/CS school IMO in my country - at the age of 40+ I'd go without doubt if they accept me).

May I ask, what is the path that leads you to the Rosetta 2 project? I even checked your graduate paper: ( https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/items/4bc518ca-a846-43ce-92f0-8... ), but it doesn't look like it's related to compiler theory.

(I myself studied Mathematics back in the day, but I was not a good student and I studied Statistics, which I joked that was NOT part of Mathematics, so I didn't take any serious Algebra classes and understand nothing of your paper)

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> May I ask, what is the path that leads you to the Rosetta 2 project?

The member of senior management who was best poised to suggest who should work on it already knew me and thought I would be the best choice. Getting opportunities in large companies is a combination of nurturing relationships and luck.

Btw, followup question, and don't take this the wrong way at all, but what is impressive is someone with a mathematical background worked on something that seems to be one of the pinnacles of software engineering: a translator working at the binary level that creates executables interacting directly with the OS. Did you also double in CS back in school? Or did you pick up the knowledge afterwards? Yeah, it seems like a long list: operating systems, compilers, computer architecture, UNIX/MacOS systems-calls and internals...

... not to mention all the performance considerations and optimizations, also requiring a strong sense of algorithms and computational complexity. Wow!

Yeah, seems like most mathematicians (and physicists) I know who go into tech don't get past learning a couple of programming languages and don't have an interest in learning the depths of a how a computer works. Very impressive!

I had an interest in programming at an early age. My dad would always bring home the old computer magazines from the IT department at work and I would pore over them. I got a bit obsessed with MIT AI lab myths in books like Levy’s Hackers. In a stroke of luck, I found a copy of SICP at the local bookstore in middle school and kept struggling through it.

I originally wasn’t going to go to university, but my parents suggested I go for CS. I transferred into Pure Math in my first term after the intro Java programming course asked us to implement tic-tac-toe without using arrays.

Basically all of the low-level programming and systems stuff was learned on the job, but it helped that my first job at Apple was working on WebKit’s interpreter (and later JIT), coming out of a Google Summer of Code doing the same thing. One of my coworkers on that project was an alumnus of the original Rosetta from Transitive, and he later ended up managing the group doing the transition to Apple silicon on the SWE side (I was part of HW Technologies). An interesting example of how things loop back in the industry.

Don't think I have ever heard of the SICP book as my school split all these different subjects it covers into different courses. But looked it up and wow, it goes into a lot of advanced subjects! (recursion, trees, Big O and computational complexity, Data abstractions, Objects, and ends with compilers). That is some survey and it's amazing you were able to work through this in middle school - I was just learning Algebra and the history of the early Americans back then - Incredible

This now makes sense you were able to work on Rosetta 2 mainly on your own!

Can relate this too. Tried to read SCIP but dropped after a couple of chapters because I couldn't wrap my head around some of the exercises and the ' symbol.

Eventually figured out I'm more into comp arch, assembly language and such instead of the more Math part of CS.

Yeah, higher-level math is got to be one of the hardest subjects a person can study. I find it quite a challenging too:)

I can relate with introductory CS courses. I switched to Statistics after ghe first course is a Java class and prof complained that back in his time no one gave introductory programming classes as they expected the students to self teach.

I kinda agreed with him.

Thank you for the information! I'm sure your skills are well trusted.

Waterloo really is the best CS school in the world.

I have never been there, what do you consider to be its speciality comparing to say MIT and Berkeley?

Didn’t go there but worked with a lot of great folks who did. The main thing I think is that they require their students to get industry experience before they graduate.

I don’t remember the actual requirement, unfortunately.

Thanks, is it something different from coop? I checked their graduation requirement and it is indeed interesting:

> Students admitted at the 1A level (except for those in Business Administration and Computer Science double degree), will normally have eight academic terms and six work terms.

Six work terms seem to be a LOT. Most coops I know is just a few summers.

Belgium, London, ABBA, Canada, or San Dimas? Why better than others?

lol, pretty sure it is Waterloo Canada / Ontario. People like to “idolize” their Alma Mater.

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