GW-Basic creator Greg Whitten on Joel Spolsky and other MS things
classiccmp.org
classiccmp.org
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/82s16/has_joel_...
The context is important. First, it is in reply to this, which quotes Spolsky as:
"This seemed to piss off a guy named Greg Whitten who headed up the App Architecture
group. Now, Greg was something like Microsoft employee number 6. He had been around
forever; nobody could quite point to anything he had done but apparently he had
lunch with Bill Gates a lot and GW-BASIC was named after him."
Second, the post to the mailing list itself is a forward of a private e-mail
from Greg Whitten. I can't see if he said anywhere he was okay with making
it public.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles
"This seemed to piss off a guy named Greg Whitten who headed up the App Architecture group. Now, Greg was something like Microsoft employee number 6. He had been around forever; nobody could quite point to anything he had done but apparently he had lunch with Bill Gates a lot and GW-BASIC was named after him."
In particular, this line: "I was a world class expert in graph theory, analysis of algorithms, sparse matrix algorithms for linear systems, numerical analysis, and non-linear multi-variate time series analyis before arriving at Microsoft to write language compilers." Any one of the set {graph theory, algorithm analysis, numerical analysis, linear systems, and non-linear multivariate ts} is a full PhD and a full life on its own. Nobody is an expert in all 5.
Frankly, he sounds like the sort of person startups in particular should stay as far away from as humanly possible. I worked for someone like this at my last startup and he was a cancer. But he could hold endless meetings, drop jargon like a master, demean fellow employees, and act as a general barrier to accomplishing useful work.
Maybe he's spot on, maybe not. But one thing is for sure; his story does not contain a trace of humility.
"He made other similarly stupid decisions like creating a custom programming interface for BASIC in Excel instead of sharing a common interface as strongly recommended. "
Did anyone else think of his special Fog Creek internal programming language?
I particularly like this article that says you should only write new production code in a language lots of people know and others have lots of experience in and then ends with we don't though. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html
There. Fixed it.
(Yes, it's a rhetorical question, but if there's a reason why this has suddenly become timely I'd actually like to know.)
That I can answer. In a recent episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Joel Spolsky mentioned that old Excel Basic story as an example of dealing with self-declared software architects. Unfortunately, I don't remember the exact episode number and the transcription wiki doesn't have it yet. But he basically didn't say anything that he hasn't already said in his "Two Stories" article (link below).
(I don't know if this new discussion is particularly interesting or relevant, but that's why it suddenly erupted.)
Links:
Stack Overflow blog/podcast: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/
Transcription wiki: https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/?W4
Old Joel article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/TwoStories.html
The one time JS is a douche, he gets called on it big time, and there's nothing he can say to make himself seem like less of a douche.
I am sure JS and GW are both perfectly fine people if you sit down with them for a cup of coffee, and if they randomly sat next to each other on a plane they'd probably get along fine too.
Stuff you write stays on the internet forever.