"Tell me about how you launched a billion dollar company from your apartment with stolen office chairs and I'm there. Tell me how you really like pointers, and I sort of lose interest."
Thankfully (for the authors and publishers), for some of us, that is reversed. The phrasing can be different.
"Tell me how and why you created a new language, and I am interested. Tell me how hard work and determination is how you made your money and the key to success for the rest of us and I lose interest"
EDIT: Ok I am reading the pdf version now and it is VERY enjoyable.
from the first chapter/interview
"Seibel: What about XScreenSaver—do you still work on that?
Zawinski: I still write new screen savers every now and then just for kicks, and that’s all C.
Seibel: Do you use some kind of IDE for that?
Zawinski: I just use Emacs, mostly. Though recently, I ported XScreenSaver to OS X. The way I did that was I reimplemented Xlib in terms of Cocoa, the Mac graphics substrate, so I wouldn’t have to change the source code of all the screen savers. They’re still making X calls but I implemented the back end for each of those. And that was in Objective C, which actually is a pretty nice language. I enjoyed doing that. It definitely feels Java-like in the good ways but it also feels like C.
Because it’s essentially C, you can still link directly with C code and just call the functions and not have to bend over backwards."
............................................
"Seibel: Six or seven being the whole Netscape development team or the Unix development team?
Zawinski: That was the whole client team. There were also the server folks who were implementing their fork of Apache, basically. We didn’t talk to them much because we were busy. We had lunch with them, but that was it. So we figured out what we wanted to be in the thing and we divided up the work so that there were, I guess, no more
than two people working on any part of the project. I was doing the Unix side and Lou Montulli did most of back-end network stuff. And Eric Bina was doing layout and Jon Mittelhauser and Chris Houck were doing the Windows front end and Aleks Toti and Mark Lanett were doing the Mac front end for the pre–version 1.0 team. Those teams grew a little bit after that. But we’d have our meetings and then go
back to our cubicles and be heads-down for 16 hours trying to make something work.
"
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"They thought just by virtue of being here, they were bound for glory doing it their way. But when they were doing it their way, at their company, they failed. So when the people who had been successful said to them, “Look, really, don’t use C++; don’t use threads,” they said, “What are you talking about? You don’t know anything.”
Well, it was decisions like not using C++ and not using threads that made us ship the product on time. The other big thing was we always shipped all platforms simultaneously; that was another thing they thought was just stupid. “Oh, 90 percent of people are using
Windows, so we’ll focus on the Windows side of things and then we’ll port it later.” Which is what many other failed companies have done. If you’re trying to ship a cross-platform product, history really shows that’s how you don’t do it. If you want it to really be cross-platform, you have to do them simultaneously. The porting thing results in a crappy product on the second platform.
They didn’t start from scratch with a blank disk but they
eventually replaced every line of code. And they used C++ from the beginning. Which I fought against so hard and, dammit, I was right. It bloated everything;
"
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there's lots of interesting anecdotes and insights about his work with Peter Norvig at Berkeley, with Lucid and at Netscape and how he learned lisp and how he hates perl but uses it anyway and the hardest bug he ever encountered ( real doozy but i won't spoil the surprise for you) and so on .. And that's just Chapter 1.
I must be weird but I really enjoy reading stuff like that.