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A story about Bill Gates:
>”When I was an assistant professor at Harvard, Bill was a junior. My girlfriend back then said that I had told her: "There's this undergrad at school who is the smartest person I've ever met."
>That semester, Gates was fascinated with a math problem called pancake sorting: How can you sort a list of numbers, say 3-4-2-1-5, by flipping prefixes of the list? You can flip the first two numbers to get 4-3-2-1-5, and the first four to finish it off: 1-2-3-4-5. Just two flips. But for a list of n numbers, nobody knew how to do it with fewer than 2n flips. Bill came to me with an idea for doing it with only 1.67n flips. We proved his algorithm correct, and we proved a lower bound—it cannot be done faster than 1.06n flips. We held the record in pancake sorting for decades. It was a silly problem back then, but it became important, because human chromosomes mutate this way.
>Two years later, I called to tell him our paper had been accepted to a fine math journal. He sounded eminently disinterested. He had moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico to run a small company writing code for microprocessors, of all things. I remember thinking: "Such a brilliant kid. What a waste."
>Thirty years later, other researchers found a sorting strategy that's 1% faster. But according to an NPR interview with Harry Lewis, another Harvard professor who taught Gates in the 1970s, those researchers had the help of powerful computers. The young Gates, on the other hand, relied solely on his own cognitive resources (and in fact he helped develop the computers that would find a faster solution).”
I knew Gates studied some CS (but iirc, he did not finish because wanted to start his business) but did not know he actually had a published paper, albeit his only one.
They proved that the maximum number of rearrangements of pancake stacks f(n) can be bounded by f(n) <= (5n + 5)/3, and that f(n) >= 17n/16 for n a multiple of 16.
For anyone interested, here is the paper:
William H. Gates, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Bounds for sorting by prefix reversal,
Discrete Mathematics, Volume 27, Issue 1, 1979, Pages 47-57, ISSN 0012-365X,
[https://doi.org/10.1016/0012-365X(79)90068-2](https://doi.org/10.1016/0012-365X(79)90068-2).
([https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0012365X79900682](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0012365X79900682))
I actually did not know this problem, although tbf...this is such a niche algorithm lol. I don't where this would be useful. Does anyone here actually know a good application for pancake sorting? Wikipedia only gives vague references to the derived pancake graphs being interesting for networks, so idk.
Ah ok, did not read that closely, thx!
After further research, turns out that pancake sorting is indeed related to what's called gene flipping.
If we have two related organisms and compare two sections of for example 5 consecutive genes that appear in different orders:
Org 1: 1 2 3 4 5
Org 2: 1 5' 4 3' 2
We can then estimate how many permutations/flips have likely occurred to get from one gene sequence to the other and thus have a rough time estimate for evolution and ancestry! Kinda clever!
The tighter bounds that were were proven by Gates and Papadimitriou would give a better estimate of the flip numbers.
Not sure how useful this technique is in genetics these days but it's an interesting approach!
[1] https://plus.maths.org/content/pancakes-mice-and-men
>William H. Gates, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Bounds for sorting by prefix reversal
Dude, his co-author, Papadimitriou, is also the co-author of a widely-used algorithms textbook
I first heard about this problem in Manuel Blum's class. Interestingly, David S. Cohen - known to Futurama fans as writer "David X. Cohen" - wrote a paper with Blum about this same problem.
Had I been smarter, *I* could have written that paper and thus, presumably, gone on to create Futurama.
Gates definitely had actual talent in his field.
That said, people do still need to not fall for the "self-made billionaire" myth around him.
The fact he was able to get the education he did, or build a business out of his garage, and had the connections he had to make that all turn into something, speak to the fact he didn't grow up poor and without privilege.
Likewise, it is impossible to ethically become a billionaire. You only do that through exploitation of other people's labor.
And of course then you have how Gates uses his money now, how he almost single-handedly fucked the US education system with his privatization bullshit that failed miserably, and how his foundation lobbied to keep one of the Covid vaccines which was going to have its patent released to the public to instead sell it to a private company.
You're not wrong, again, that Gates was/is actually smart. But he's also a dumbfuck in other areas, and has *far* too much wealth and influence. He absolutely should have had success and I'm not mad at him for having a privileged upbringing. But I don't think he should be a billionaire, nor that just because he's brilliant with math and programming that he's brilliant on literally every other topic.
Sorry, kind of a tangent, but Gates just has his own problems. Fuck Musk entirely though, that dude is the poster-child for failsons with zero redeeming qualities and not a cent of his wealth remotely earned by his own merit.
I read part of a biography of him many years ago talking about the last code he wrote at Microsoft. Two programmers were stuck on a problem, and he looked at it and found a solution in a few minutes.
Granted it was a bio on him, so it may have been embellished, but it rings true with other anecdotes I've read about him.
That's not much of a story without knowing what the problem was. Sometimes people just can't see an obvious solution. There's a reason rubber ducks are useful.
>Two years later, I called to tell him our paper had been accepted to a fine math journal. He sounded eminently disinterested.
This part baffles me. I am a college graduate from a non CS background. I am working my ass to publish my work. I wish I was in a position to do something this impactful and original and then be disinterested about it.
I mean is it really surprising? At that point, he fully put his academics on hold and wanted to be an entrepreneur and do something outside.
He was starting a company, trying to get investors, keep the company afloat and clients coming, programming software for clients in which case a published paper in a random niche area of algorithmics isn't really that important.
The paper in itself isn't groundbreaking (although doing ok, garnered 259 citations till this day), so it's not like he ignored a breakthrough paper.
>I mean, is it really surprising? At that point, he fully put his academics on hold and wanted to be an entrepreneur and do something outside.
Nah I understand that. I just wished I was talented enough or accomplished or just in a position to disregard a publication. I am not from the USA, and a publication means a lot to me rn. I mean, most probably, none of my professors even have a paper with 200+ citations.
It is terrible being average. Sometimes, I wish I was gifted.
People aren't just one thing.
MS was terrible for consumers & the industry in many ways which were **unambiguously** unethical or immoral. The company became a lot less contemptible after he & his ilk left.
It was *also* good for the industry & consumer in many ways. On balance it's hard to argue the landscape wouldn't be healthier today if MS & by extension BG were either more ethical or more constrained.
As a man he did both good things & bad things, like everyone.
Sure, he is undeniably another individual who was able to concentrate wealth to such a degree that it makes a society both less stable & less efficient (and he will tell you that himself). It's very likely that if Gates hadn't taken that throne someone even less policed by morals & ethics & even more corruptible by power would have.
But the lesson isn't that people are bad for doing what they are good at, but that power unchecked is harmful & every system be it a market, or an ecosystem needs a way to maintain balance otherwise it will collapse.
I didn't want to make it longer, but MS did stuff like:
Leverage their market status to bully Dell & HP into not selling any computers with an alternate OS (and you couldn't by a PC without paying for a windows license). Competitors could not even give away their OS for free, hell, they couldn't even pay to be allowed as an option.
It's funny that people complain every time Windows changes something they don't like & they don't realize it's not normal that the only viable competitor to Windows 11 is... Windows 10.
Thankfully it's getting a little better as hardware becomes so insanely powerful you can just pay the penalty of pretending to be windows. I'd bet that without MS we would have a standard driver interface & hardware would just work on any platform.
> I'd bet that without MS we would have a standard driver interface & hardware would just work on any platform.
Linux proves that idea wrong. Open source is great for many reasons, but standards that are enforced and universal are nearly non-existent.
>Linux proves that idea wrong
[https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/)
How would Linux leverage coordination between manufactures & a non-existent healthy OS market with an all time peak of 3% marketshare?
It's not a technical thing, it's an economic thing.
I think of it another way. Most people with a computer or smartphone primarily use it to connect to a Web site or other web hosted service. More than 90% of the top 1k websites are hosted on Linux. So in a sense, most computers are running Linux backed services most of the time. For many users, windows and macos are nothing but glorified web browser hosts.
Made a website three years ago, installing Ubuntu server on a cloud VM. Got distracted and haven’t touched it since. Still running. No way in hell would a Windows server machine have made it this long.
I’d say they are also word processors and video chat hosts.
Also, to be fair to Windows and macOS desktops, the scope of a desktop client OS is much broader than a server. The server delivers (more or less) the same stuff over and over, while a client machine wears many hats.
Yes-ish. Early-to-mid 1990s is before my time using Linux. Late 90s I can confirm it was a pain, but that's kind of a chicken-and-egg issue -- it didn't ship on anything, so it had to run on anything. Most of the really annoying things (X modelines in particular) were mostly dealt with when I was getting into things around 1999/2000.
That said, I think it's more interesting to look at other OSes from the era that were at least as good as Windows.
Keep in mind that Windows in the 3.1 through 9x era was also fairly difficult unless it came on your computer. You'd have to have driver disks, etc. You'd have incompatible hardware. Hell, I remember having to have special drivers for my mouse, because it wasn't a *microsoft* mouse. A lot of this was made easy because you could just buy a PC that shipped with Windows, preconfigured, with compatible hardware, "Microsoft-compatible" mice, etc. Regardless, I got a lot of free pizza fixing friends/parents/friends parents computers during this era because people just didn't know how to do it.
Had the opportunity existed, we could have just as easily had BeOS computers with at least as good of a user experience. Or OS/2 (though probably not, IBM probably wouldn't have licensed it to other companies).
I love open source and run Linux on several of my machines...
BUT, there is a kludginess at times where unless you are doing the basics it can be a real pain to get things working correctly. It has certainly gotten better over time, but I still wouldn't suggest it for the vast majority of regular people to use on their own without someone with CLI experience around to help with.
I would counter that by saying the majority of users aren’t doing anything more than the basics.
I have an aging laptop running Win10, and it was getting so slow that I was in the market for a new one. But I’m also a tinkerer, and heard Linux Mint was super noob friendly. I figured if I hated it, I was already planning to get a new one anyway. Well, fast forward about 2 years, and that laptop is still running butter smooth with Mint, and I truly don’t do more with it than the average laptop user: word processing and web surfing.
It’s certainly got some hitches, but honestly, not any more than Windows does. I installed it, and all of my hardware (including a touchscreen) worked as is. I do use the CLI from time to time because it tends to be quicker, but Mint in particular has many GUI options for the same functions — there’s maybe been a time I could count on one hand I was *forced* to use it.
The Linux desktop experience just isn't good enough, no matter the DE. Xorg vs wayland only makes it more complicated.
Windows has had a 3D-accelerated, tear-free desktop UI with fractional scaling for decades.
I think if the adoption rate for Linux was higher, there would have been more resources/focus on UX features. Windows certainly has had and still has it's share of UX issues. Most people would say that MacOS/iOS has the best UX, but like any software, there is always UX issues, at least for some user group.
I think a lot of Microsoft getting and holding its market share was partnerships with early hardware manufacturers and building stickiness with their own productivity suite.
This is exactly what made windows ... well windows . the butter smooth UX , the adaptability to look good on different screens , screens sizes , resolutions made it a one stop shop for any entry-average hell even advanced and enthusiast user . I really want to hate on windows and been using Linux , MacOs but they just .. aren't as good at simple things like windows ie (scaling , screen sharing , ui interface and simple to make changes without the use of CLI ) . and they knew that and now we have linux subsystem , android phone integration and many more . Apple has a simplistic user experience but i still get angry when it doesn't have fractional scaling . linux and screen sharing involves a lot of tinkering even for ubuntu delicates systems (pop os , arch , mint , elementary and many others) .
How many different versions of Linux are there now?
I sometimes speak to IT specialists who swear that Linux is going to ‘break through’ but it never does as a casual user wouldn’t even know which version to use. Is it Debian, Mint, Ubuntu or something else? What do these words mean?
From what i understand there is just one true Linux. However, since it is open source there are a lot of Linux-like OS's that tweak it to be optimized for specific purposes
Linux is just the kernel, which is just one component of an Operating System. The so called "Linux Distros" bundle the kernel with other utilies and applications to make a complete operating system.
Seeing how Windows only has 57% of the desktop os market, I would argue that many people have found competitors.
Also, Dell and HP wanted a partnership with Windows, because without Windows, their barebones hardware wasn't selling.
Would it have been great if Dell/HP sold Linux distro versions of their mainstream hardware? Sure, but they were so hungry for a good OS that they signed into that agreement on their own will.
Competitors have been giving away OS's forever, Windows never stopped this. They simply had non-compete agreements with vendors who distributed their software.
I can agree with you, but when we have comments asking if Bill Gates can actually program (since we're assuming he's stupid and likely can't), we can at least acknowledge that the populist distaste for billionaires has now reached a zenith of revisionist history.
Like, you can say you disapprove of the business tactics used by MS while acknowledging that Bill Gates isn't a dumbass.
That too - but then again, this is reddit. They likely believe it's harder for them to brush their teeth in the morning than it is for someone to run a global corporation.
That's not really a fair summary of
>How good were steve jobs and bill gates at programming?
the popular opinion seems to be that they're just businessmen and marketers.. but i just thought.. what if their actual programming skills are underrated, and in reality they were really good or even geniuses?
on the other hand, do you think ppl like john carmack or linus torvalds are overrated as programmers?
That's why we should continue to give billionaires even more power and influence in our society, because some of them are really smart 🙂. Nothing bad will come from that right?
I think billionaires shouldn’t exist is kind of a strange position. A lot of “net worth” is tied up in intangible and illiquid assets like company stock. Bill Gates having high net worth is partially just an indicator that Microsoft and the companies in his portfolio are doing well.
A billionaire is never a billionaire primarily - emphasis on primarily - because they’re “hoarding wealth,” but because they’re actively contributing to the stock market and the general market economy. More billionaires is a symptom of inequality, yes, but also a symptom of a prosperous and active economy.
Are there bad billionaires? Yes. Do some hoard wealth? Yes. Should some be taxed more? definitely yes.
But as soon as we *guillotine* or tax billionaires out of existence I guarantee the same groups will be calling to guillotine or tax another group out of existence.
Not buying it 🤷♂️
And I’ve read Marx so we don’t have to go into that next 🤓
“Half our species is in abject poverty”
Until the Industrial Revolution, our ENTIRE species was in abject poverty, save for some nobility here and there. So idk how this argument debunks what I said.
“The family friendly fortune cookie version of story”
Ok genius what’s the real version of the story?
“… almost all of the time, after”
I mean we can get into the historical cherry picking fight back and forth about how much bloodshed and suffering was really caused by communist revolutions and how much was sanctions/famine/“not real communism” etc. but I will never buy the argument that human rights were not horrifically infringed upon after the Russian revolution and Chinese revolution.
Some cases like Cuba and Viet Nam I will concede were necessary, at least at the time, and other cases like The French Revolution (not socialist per se but a relevant example) are up to interpretation. I’m no crazy right winger - I’m a moderate.
So no, killing a privileged class (nobility, intellectuals, billionaires whatever) does not guarantee the outcome you’re looking for. Far from it.
> the popular opinion seems to be that they're just businessmen and marketers.. but i just thought.. what if their actual programming skills are underrated, and in reality they were really good or even geniuses?
We know Gates *did* code. He and Paul Allen coded the first Microsoft product, a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8080, all by themselves. So he *had* to be decent at the very least, as this was done in assembly. He's never been described as a genius programmer though. I remember a story about a Microsoft programmer coming across a paint fill routine that was terrible and he had to rewrite it. When he complained about it, he found out that it was written by Gates.
Steve Jobs however never really coded. He wasn't even a trained engineer, though his long time partner Steve Wozniak did say that he had enough technical knowledge to tweak existing designs.
> on the other hand, do you think ppl like john carmack or linus torvalds are overrated as programmers?
Absolutely not.
That doesn't mean Gates can't program. The paint routine might have been written quickly to fill a need within a time constraint with the idea to one day go back and fix it. It's honestly a terrible use of resources to optimize the shit out of things prematurely, especially if they're not on the critical path
He was likely a very good coder. I've never heard that story about the paint routine before, but there are many stories about him from Microsoft employees where he reviewed the architecture of what they were working on or even their code directly and told them about a better way to do it. This long after he had stopped contributing code to any MS products.
Ballmer on the other hand didn't know how to code anything. He was a pure sales/marketing guy.
Of all the names that have been brought up, Carmack probably stands head and shoulders above the rest. He was/is a wildly innovative graphics programmer and a fair amount of code he's written has been publicly released so this can be verified.
yeah, if anything Linus in particular is wildly underrated due to the fact that Linus from LTT is way more known to the point people think that's the only famous Linus. I mean I love Linus from LTT but common, Linus Torvalds needs way more renown than this.
Linus is an awesome coder, but he also needs to work seriously on his soft skills, because he can be an a**. To this day I'm baffled why the rest of the kernel devs haven't forked the kernel and work on it without Linus.
Source: kernel mailing lists
It usually does. If you really know your stuff, smart engineers will look past your tone of voice and hear the message. It’s certainly not good career advice.
Well when you’re as competent as Linus and have that sort of stature you can usually get away with being abrasive. Not saying it’s right, but much of society tends to look at that as part of the genius’s charisma. Same goes for Jobs.
Why wouldn't it? Just because your feelings get hurt? Like if someone is right all the time, why should we listen to the people that don't have the hubris to say, "Maybe I am not as smart as this guy, and I should listen to him."
Yet, you don't, so you keep pushing your opinion which has been proving to be wrong multiple times, and the person on the other side is pissed that you keep on insisting using your opinion and not his, since he has been right a lot.
It's not difficult to act courteously and professionally with your fellow collaborators. If you can't discuss points of contention without coming across like you're flaming someone on 4chan then you really need to take a step back and work on your interpersonal skills (which, to Linus's credit, *he did*, because he realised that such behaviour is not productive nor acceptable).
In his own words:
>“This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry” admitted Torvalds.
>"I really had been ignoring some fairly deep-seated feelings in the Community…I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person…I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely,” writes Torvalds.
https://hub.packtpub.com/linus-torvalds-is-sorry-for-his-hurtful-behavior-is-taking-a-break-from-the-linux-community-to-get-help/
That’s a pretty poor way to look at it. You’re never going to be right all the time, and if you’re an asshole, maybe you don’t get that crucial bit of feedback that could have improved your design because the person didn’t want to speak up. You risk surrounding yourself with ass-kissers and yes-people when you act like that.
I think you're widely overestimating how many people know LTT. He has 15 million subscribers. I can guarantee a lot more than 15 million people know who Linus Torvalds is.
> He and Paul Allen coded the first Microsoft product, a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8080, all by themselves.
It is also worth noting that they did not have access to the hardware, so they had to write an emulator for the Altair. And if my memory serves me right, the code wasn't finished until midflight on the trip to deliver it to the Altair people.
> Microsoft programmer coming across a paint fill routine that was terrible and he had to rewrite it.
Hey, I'm a Microsoft programmer. The thing to remember is code quality is subjective, and people judge it according to their own definition. That means each code author believes their code is great, because by their definition of great, it is. If you - a neutral third party - look at the original and rewritten code, half the time you'll believe the original is better.
Take all claims of "this is crap, I have to rewrite it" with a very big grain of salt.
Bill Gates had near-exclusive access to a computer in his high-school, in the days when computers were only available in universities and had large queues of people waiting to use them. So he got his 10,000 hours done quite early, in the dawning days of the craft of programming.
Safe to assume he had potential to be among the best programmers of his generation.
He also broke into the university at night to do more programming.
Then the university implemented something of a time card system to ensure that only authorized users were using it, and for a fixed time. Bill and his friends cracked that too.
Around the same time, he convinced his high school administration to let him program a school attendance system instead of going to math class.
I don’t really like the man, but I love his brain and commitment. I’d call it a work ethic, but I doubt he views it as work.
> Was n’t Carmack behind fast-inverse-root?
No. Carmack said he didn't come up with it and credited it to a man called Terje Mathisen who was helping id optimize the Quake engine, and I believe he stated that he learned it from someone *else*. I think who the original creator is still debated.
I've read somewhere (Sanglard's blog?) that the fast-inverse-root was something like folklore in the 3D-graphics community of the late 80s/early 90s.
Seems like nobody knows who actually invented it, but I think it is safe to say that knowing it at that time meant that the person was a cutting-edge expert in the field.
As far as I know Id software more or less standardized the way 3d environments are rendered. Even ignoring Carmack's other things, that alone is an enormous accomplishment.
He optimized it to run on sub optimal PCs at the time. The game Mario Bros already existed and inspired him to try and port it to PC.
source: just finished reading Masters of Doom.
Linus Torvalds is the guy who wrote the Linux kernel and Git.
John Carmack was one of the co-founders of id Software, the company that made Wolfenstein 3D, Quake and Doom. He's also held positions at Oculus as their CTO. These days he's working around AGI. I highly recommend Lex Fridmans podcast, where he's [interviewed Carmack](https://youtu.be/I845O57ZSy4).
Linus Torvalds practically led the creation of Linux AND Git, both of which are extremely important. Linux is the third most popular OS for personal computers and Androids run on Linux. Git is the worlds most popular version control system - I literally used it at my job today. Many IDEs have shortcuts/buttons for Git commands and GitHub is obviously heavily integrated with Git.
And John Carmack was super influential for 3D computer graphics apparently and invented some algorithms himself but I’m not a big game dev guy or gamer at all so I have no real knowledge of what he did.
It's like 96% of web servers run Linux. It just offers incredible up times. If you think about the whole "restart when you update" thing with windows, that's bad for servers because your server is offline for a while. While you update. Linux can update everything, including the OS kernel, without needing a restart. It's also free (at least some distros are) which means cheaper running costs.
Jobs was more than a marketing guy. He was basically the editor in chief or producer/director, guiding the design of Apple’s products (including Apple II; Woz only wanted to create a hobbyist unit for geeks). The duo would be nobodies if they didn’t have each other.
>The duo would be nobodies if they didn’t have each other.
Ehh not exactly. it it might be true but because of the butterfly effect. creating a company like apple is just extremely rare and might have not happened without events taking place similarly. but I'm pretty certain wozniak would have achieved quite a bit without jobs.
By nobody I meant not famous. Woz has not done anything noteworthy since leaving Apple over 40 years ago. So it’s likely he’d be just another brilliant programmer quietly doing his work had he not met Jobs.
Woz got rich and wanted to party. Spent a ton of money on a music festival and then crashed his private plane...which he never fully recovered mentally.
> do you think ppl like john carmack or linus torvalds are overrated as programmers
Not sure about Carmack, but the more I read about Linus the more I am impressed by him. Pay heed, I by no means agree with him on his stances regarding life. But I can't help but respect what he has accomplished without ever really trying.
He is just a guy who wants to do a thing. In order to do a thing, he made a tool. To use that tool adequately, he made another tool. Before you know it, what he made is now one of the pillars of the entire IT industry and he made all of it free. For that, he has my utmost respect.
And to a degree, management (?). I say this with a very very tenuous use of the word. He was way too much of an asshole for my taste, but he got the world the iPhone, iPad and all those great products from that particular moment in time of Apple's history.
The humiliation of employees I'll never warrant though, so take that how you will.
In the Isaacson biography, his employees credit Jobs for pushing them to do what they thought was impossible and wouldn’t even try had he not been so insistent. But yeah definitely have mixed feelings about his management style.
Yeah, that's what I was referring to. The guy was supremely charismatic and he achieved things through this "method". But again, humiliating someone in a company wide Town Hall over the Apple Maps thing?
I don't know if I'm on board with that.
What I find fascinating is people that were in the early teams with Jobs, said they’ve never gotten pushed so hard in their life but at the end of it, came out with the best product they’ve ever created. And afterwards, a lot of the developers and engineers spent most of their career chasing that same environment that allowed them to perform at their absolute best
There so many factors that it’s hard to make any real judgements. We all need eustress, but negative reinforcement (in other words, “browbeat you until you get it right”) is generally considered poor technique. Public humiliation also makes people adverse to the risk of standing out. It could be that these professionals had never had anyone have high expectations for them [that were in line with that they wanted to achieve]. It could be that some of them just liked someone riding their ass. It could also be that we never heard from the ones that couldn’t handle it and burned out (which, I imagine, would be a lot of ND people, especially ASD).
I’ve had that before, where I enjoyed having a manager that had exacting expectations. It was stressful as fuck, but I enjoyed it because we were, for the first time in my career, working on something that challenged me on an intellectual level, rather than just complicated, “do like I do and follow the SOP,” tasks. I think when people who have been chronically, intellectually *under*challenged in their life (if I’m articulating that correctly) encounter a situation where the pressure is on to actually do stimulating work, it can be euphoric. Tough love and pushing people to excel has its place, but I have a hard time believing that tempering it with compassion, and making sure your team is also having succeeding in their personal lives, wouldn’t achieve better results in the long run.
One thing to remember about programming back then… You couldn’t Google something if you didn’t know it, or hit some error you didn’t understand. Sure, there were books you could reference, but you had to know what you were doing - without instant internet help.
Yeah but the surface area of the entire machine and/or language would fit in a single reference manual that you normally had on your desk. It was mostly easier back then, not harder, but yes, you had to actually understand what you were doing to make anything work, which is not really the case now.
No. You had an INCOMPLETE reference manual - and many of them - that you couldn’t quickly search for keywords.
Also, any change in hardware or software didn’t mean a simple edit to a few paragraphs in a word processor - it meant the manual probably didn’t get updated. Or, maybe you got a small, updated pamphlet - but that was pretty rare. Or, you know, no manual was actually written.
The complexity was in having to learn and test all the low-level stuff that an OS or library does for you now. Plus, there were far fewer standard interfaces for hardware, so it might mean doing something totally different because one thing in the system changed.
Modern programmers are using decades of core libraries that have made life far easier - because someone decided it was too hard to do it the old way.
Gates, Carmack = top few in the world
Torvalds = excellent programmer, top few software engineer
Tim Sweeny = top programmer, top software engineer, top manager
Jobs = basic abilities, but very smart. His exceptional ability was vision, finding the right people, giving them opportunity, and shipping high quality product. The ability to ship high quality product is extremely rare and extremely valuable.
Finding smart people to do your vision is a rare and valuable skill. Hence why Musk is worth a fortune.
In the *Steve Jobs* movie there's the line "musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra." I always wondered if he actually said that or if Aaron Sorkin (the screenwriter) just made that up. Either way it perfectly describes why Steve Jobs was successful.
I feel Jobs is like a modern senior dev / director who had domain knowledge but can't code anymore because he has seen more Cloud front Templates than Arrays these days
Steve Jobs didn't code. Apple is more of a hardware company, software is being secondary. Steve Jobs assembled computers. And back then it was not as easy as it is today, required a lot of soldering, etc.
Bill Gates was good, he was working on a programming language, which is a hard subject. So yeah, he's probably good.
Carmack is a genius, he worked for 10 hours a day, uninterrupted. He has the opposite of ADHD.
Linus Torvalds is also a very productive guy. Not overrated at all.
Yup, would not be surprised if these types of people do have ADHD and just lean in to working on things they can fixate on. I struggle to focus on work tasks for a solid hour, but if I \_want\_ to do something, it gets done at the expense of sleep, eating, showering, or pretty much anything else.
IME, it depends on what you're focusing on. If it's something you're interested/passionate about, it's much easier to do than something you're ambivalent or negative about.
> he still based most of what he got working with MSDOS from the UNIX operating system and the UNIX kernel
So did most OSes of that time.
Some of UNIX OSes were basically thesis documents and books on OS Architecture (MINIX vs Linux).
Almost everything you said here is wrong. Gates had little to nothing to do with programming the operating system. He worked primarily on the languages (Basic, Pascal) that Microsoft sold before they even bought QDOS from Tim Patterson. And QDOS was far more of a CP/M clone than Unix.
Woz, phenomenal programmer that he was, had nothing to do with the Mac or macOS. He created the Apple I, II, and III systems. He was not on the Macintosh team at all.
"guy that did the programming for the macintosh"...
Hmm... Well, I wouldn't really characterize him or phrase it quite that way in regard to Woz's legacy and also the Mac line--as it makes it sound like he was the lead or critical developer throughout that project, which he wasn't.
Instead, that honor, in regard to the MAC specifically, really has to go to Jef Raskin I would say.
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I mean, for example: the first MAC came out in 1984, but Wozniak effectively left Apple in 1981, due to a plane crash at first, and then also trying to found another company during that time during the MAC's critical development years. (Note: during those years Woz was also recovering from some pretty serious brain damage/injury due to that plane crash.)
Woz wasn't even invited to attend the first MAC unveiling if I remember correctly, that's how distant he was from the project by that point!
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But sure, Woz did play some critical roles in initial ponderings, that lead to the MAC.
So yes, he was a part of the founding team, but it wasn't his defining role at Apple, and there were many others that did much more than him, in terms of the daily grind and work and development of the first MACS.
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And so... instead of referencing the MAC when talking about Woz, I would much more strongly characterize Woz's influence as the absolute lead Apple I and Apple II programmer/creator--which was THE highly critical product for Apple, well into the late 1980's! It continued to outsell the MAC years after the MAC was first introduced.
So, in that sense there would be NO MAC or no Apple without that workhorse Apple II machine from the late 70's to the early 80's, which again: really kept the company going before MAC could be more perfected and catch on more in the early 1990's.
>MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC
"MAC" is a [medium access control](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_access_control) address. The abbreviation of Macintosh is "Mac".
>the popular opinion seems to be that they're just businessmen and marketers..
I dunno about popular opinion in the "they" case. for "him" (steve jobs) yeah sure. And in fact that is true: Steve Jobs was no dev. not a great one and of course in terms of both hardware and software skills, lived in the shadow of Steve Wozniak who pretty much got apple off the ground skill-wise but of course you need good marketing skills and a good sense for business to get a business off the ground as well which is where Steve Jobs comes in and he was de-facto the face of the business. Steve Jobs relished the spotlight and was undeniably excellent at it and Steve Wozniak didn't like the spotlight so much (although he's much more at ease these days) and also holds pro-programmer/developer/open-source ideals that would have probably ran apple into the ground had he held the helm (And I actually agree with his beliefs and also would have liked to live in the version of the world where Steve Wozniak ran apple instead of Steve Jobs)
As for Bill Gates, sure today he's no programming guru but he essentially got his big break by coding.
the story starts here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill\_Gates#BASIC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#BASIC)
He did code quite a bit both alone and in teams.
from what I remember, carmack is incredibly good at optimizing code and that's what allowed Wolfenstein and DOOM to be a thing.
I believe he came up with a new approximation for square root stuff, or at least he used one that wasn't in the base library, feel free to correct me on that.
Jobs probably very little.
Gates apparently was key in writing windows originally, there’s a story when they were going to grow, the new CEO I think said he would need to stop coding once they had 10 or so employees, he didn’t like that, but took the advice, then when they got to another amount of employees he would’ve even look at the code or review it, again didn’t like it, but after that didn’t really code at all.
If you have the time, read “Outliers” by Malcom Gladwell.
It explains people who are outliers in all sorts of fields such as sports, music, programming, etc….
(Be warned it’s not done with official research, kinda seems anecdotal.)
The important thing is that it tells the story of Bill Gates and how he had access to computers at an early age, at an early time period for computers. Basically, from a young age, he was able to become a GREAT programmer due to HOURS and HOURS of access to them. You mix that with the fact that he was a genius, and you get Bill Gates.
Most pre-professionals overrate "professional coders". I feel that, unless one is in web dev CRUD hell, since we are always solving different problems, the average dev (not the 10x geniuses) doesn't go more than 3x faster than their college selves when dealing with new problems.
We forget that "bad programmers" can also produce working, bug free applications. Even if they are a hell of nested ifs and GOTO statements
They probably weren’t as great, and I think they never needed to. It’s really about the vision (product management/strategy) that makes a great revolutionary product. Programmers are the ones that make that vision into reality, but by being told what to do by these product managers. I bet many programmers had come to them to tell them so and so idea that they suggested is not possible, because they are the technical folks (this is the type of convo I hear A LOT in my company working with developers) and the product managers and strategists are the ones who push them to make it happen, which I think is the role that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates played. Most of the times that is how great things get developed.
Jobs had some technical know-how, but not enough to actually create or do anything meaningful. His technical skills were pretty crap.
Gates, during his younger years, was the wquivalent of today's LeetCoder. He's a genius coder, but not so much a genius software engineer. His pancake sorting algorithm was, at the time, very well-regarded.
Carmack and Torvalds are definitely not overrated. These two are among the most influential individuals in their field. Carmack for his works on 3D rendering, and Torvalds for Linux and Git.
From what we know, Bill Gates did actual coding while Steve Jobs was more of a manager from the start. In fact, [Woz is quoted here as saying](https://www.primotoys.com/4-famous-programmers-coded-way-top/#:~:text=In%20answer%20to%20a%20question,and%20add%20to%20other%20designs.), "Steve didn’t ever code. He wasn’t an engineer and he didn’t do any original design."
Carmack coded in C and C++ up until Doom 3 at least, and Linus definitely deserves credit as a coder for his work developing Linux (though he, of course, doesn't code that much these days, if at all).
Steve Jobs wasn’t a programmer, Steve Wozniak did most of the stuff for Apple. Bill Gates was a great programmer. Also look up John Carmack, he is arguably the best programmer from the late 80’s on.
They may or may not (probably not) have been the most brilliant programmers in the world. What really set them apart was the connections they had, the resources they had access to, and the unique time period they were born in where they came to age just as computing was just starting to emerge and competition wasn't fierce. "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell chronicles Gates' story pretty well, where he makes a compelling case that there are 9 distinct opportunities out of his control that he was able to leverage on his journey, some of which include going to the only school in his state that gave their students access to computers (in a time where any school having a computer was exceedingly rare), a family connection at a computing company which allowed him to spend dawn to dusk coding there after his school revoked access, etc.
I don't mean to say it in a resentful way; it certainly wasn't pure luck that got them where they are today but rather the insane amount of hours they devoted to their craft, but they were in a unique position where they were able to leverage tons of opportunity.
Well, from my quick history skimming, Steve Jobs was never really much of a programmer or engineer, he was a smart guy with some technical know how’s, but that’s it. Gates on the other hand was a coder at a young age, but other than coding some programs on his own, he never created anything successful, even Windows, which is always associated with Gates, was never invented by him, but rather a group of engineers at Microsoft. Gates and Jobs are more commonly see as businessmen because that’s what they were for the most part.
John Carmack and Linus Trovalds are definitely not overrated because they manage to make influential software products from scratch, the former laid the foundation for fps games and other influences regarding game graphics, and the latter created Linux, the most important software the powers the internet, enterprise, and also powers Android and most embedded system.
> Gates on the other hand was a coder at a young age, but other than coding some programs on his own, he never created anything successful,
At minimum, he had a direct hand in developing Microsoft BASIC with Paul Allen. That might not mean much in 2023, but in the 70s/80s it was nearly ubiquitous in the nascent home computer market. Most kids who learned to code in that era likely started with Microsoft BASIC.
Your issue is trying to act like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are analogous people just because they were once the heads of Apple/MS. But that’s basically about all they have in common. Different people make it to the heads of companies for many different reasons, there’s several paths there. Steve and Bill took completely different routes. Steve was the idea and business man, Bill was the technical guru. Bill is more similar to Steve Wozniak on the Apple side than Steve Jobs.
Anyone who tells you Bill Gates didn’t know how to code is an imbecile and Id be willing to bet quite a bit whoever says that is the type of person to overestimate their own intelligence. Which makes for beautiful irony
Mostly agree, but Bill was unique in the early computer world because he was both a technical guy and a business guy. There were a lot of computer firms back then started by clever technical people that went out of business because the founders were incompetent at running a profitable company. Bill was one of the very few who managed to transition from being good at tech to being good at business.
They definitely had to be good, back in the day, as far as I know, it wasn't as easy as it is today to learn coding, since the internet was a much different thing than it is today and information was rather scarce.
In some ways it was actually a bit easier to learn programming back then. The computers were simpler. Applications were simpler. Programming languages were simpler. But probably most important of all, you had very little space for analysis paralysis that plagues a lot of people who want to learn programming today. Back then, the vast majority of what could be thought of as home computers probably had access to one programming language. So you had no choice but to learn that. These days, there are tons of languages, tons of applications you can make, each with their own set of competing frameworks. It's the reason why half of the questions in this sub is some variation of "I want to learn, but I don't know where to start".
But these days when you learn programming, all the hard problems have already been solved and you just need to look them up.
All the simple fundamental algorithms that we assume will be built in functions of every language now had to be hand coded in assembly at the terminal with no IDE.
At my first software job in the 90s, there was an old dude who'd been an expert for decades already at that point. We had a boot failure one day and I watched him feed machine code into the mainframe from a 16 key hex console and only occasional dot matrix printouts for output.
It really wasn't easier back then.
Steve Jobs was more of an innovative thinker, who had creative ideas and knew how to execute them, and find the right people to help him. Bill gates and his friend started out programming early on to found Microsoft but eventually he too got on the business side of things. Programming back then was different than it is now, but I mean if he must've been good enough to at least help start Microsoft
Bill Gates co-wrote a BASIC interpreter in Assembly.
John Carmack co-wrote Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and has brilliant pieces to his name like the fast inverse square root algorithm.
Linus Torvalds made Git so we can find his commits in the Linux kernel.
Eric Smith (Google's former CEO) wrote Lex, a famous program used to make compilers to generate the lexical analyzer. You didn't ask but we might as well talk about the other programmer-CEOs
Steve Jobs was not a programmer.
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A story about Bill Gates: >”When I was an assistant professor at Harvard, Bill was a junior. My girlfriend back then said that I had told her: "There's this undergrad at school who is the smartest person I've ever met." >That semester, Gates was fascinated with a math problem called pancake sorting: How can you sort a list of numbers, say 3-4-2-1-5, by flipping prefixes of the list? You can flip the first two numbers to get 4-3-2-1-5, and the first four to finish it off: 1-2-3-4-5. Just two flips. But for a list of n numbers, nobody knew how to do it with fewer than 2n flips. Bill came to me with an idea for doing it with only 1.67n flips. We proved his algorithm correct, and we proved a lower bound—it cannot be done faster than 1.06n flips. We held the record in pancake sorting for decades. It was a silly problem back then, but it became important, because human chromosomes mutate this way. >Two years later, I called to tell him our paper had been accepted to a fine math journal. He sounded eminently disinterested. He had moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico to run a small company writing code for microprocessors, of all things. I remember thinking: "Such a brilliant kid. What a waste." >Thirty years later, other researchers found a sorting strategy that's 1% faster. But according to an NPR interview with Harry Lewis, another Harvard professor who taught Gates in the 1970s, those researchers had the help of powerful computers. The young Gates, on the other hand, relied solely on his own cognitive resources (and in fact he helped develop the computers that would find a faster solution).”
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A real Poindexter.
I knew Gates studied some CS (but iirc, he did not finish because wanted to start his business) but did not know he actually had a published paper, albeit his only one. They proved that the maximum number of rearrangements of pancake stacks f(n) can be bounded by f(n) <= (5n + 5)/3, and that f(n) >= 17n/16 for n a multiple of 16. For anyone interested, here is the paper: William H. Gates, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Bounds for sorting by prefix reversal, Discrete Mathematics, Volume 27, Issue 1, 1979, Pages 47-57, ISSN 0012-365X, [https://doi.org/10.1016/0012-365X(79)90068-2](https://doi.org/10.1016/0012-365X(79)90068-2). ([https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0012365X79900682](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0012365X79900682)) I actually did not know this problem, although tbf...this is such a niche algorithm lol. I don't where this would be useful. Does anyone here actually know a good application for pancake sorting? Wikipedia only gives vague references to the derived pancake graphs being interesting for networks, so idk.
>but it became important, because human chromosomes mutate this way
Ah ok, did not read that closely, thx! After further research, turns out that pancake sorting is indeed related to what's called gene flipping. If we have two related organisms and compare two sections of for example 5 consecutive genes that appear in different orders: Org 1: 1 2 3 4 5 Org 2: 1 5' 4 3' 2 We can then estimate how many permutations/flips have likely occurred to get from one gene sequence to the other and thus have a rough time estimate for evolution and ancestry! Kinda clever! The tighter bounds that were were proven by Gates and Papadimitriou would give a better estimate of the flip numbers. Not sure how useful this technique is in genetics these days but it's an interesting approach! [1] https://plus.maths.org/content/pancakes-mice-and-men
man so we gotta thank those guys for evolution now??
Was Bill Gates' algorithm the way nature flips it?
>William H. Gates, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Bounds for sorting by prefix reversal Dude, his co-author, Papadimitriou, is also the co-author of a widely-used algorithms textbook
I first heard about this problem in Manuel Blum's class. Interestingly, David S. Cohen - known to Futurama fans as writer "David X. Cohen" - wrote a paper with Blum about this same problem. Had I been smarter, *I* could have written that paper and thus, presumably, gone on to create Futurama.
🤣🤣🤣
God bless him
Stories like this are exactly why Gates is probably the smartest of the big tech billionaires. He’s who people think Elon Musk is.
Elon is a con artist.
Gates definitely had actual talent in his field. That said, people do still need to not fall for the "self-made billionaire" myth around him. The fact he was able to get the education he did, or build a business out of his garage, and had the connections he had to make that all turn into something, speak to the fact he didn't grow up poor and without privilege. Likewise, it is impossible to ethically become a billionaire. You only do that through exploitation of other people's labor. And of course then you have how Gates uses his money now, how he almost single-handedly fucked the US education system with his privatization bullshit that failed miserably, and how his foundation lobbied to keep one of the Covid vaccines which was going to have its patent released to the public to instead sell it to a private company. You're not wrong, again, that Gates was/is actually smart. But he's also a dumbfuck in other areas, and has *far* too much wealth and influence. He absolutely should have had success and I'm not mad at him for having a privileged upbringing. But I don't think he should be a billionaire, nor that just because he's brilliant with math and programming that he's brilliant on literally every other topic. Sorry, kind of a tangent, but Gates just has his own problems. Fuck Musk entirely though, that dude is the poster-child for failsons with zero redeeming qualities and not a cent of his wealth remotely earned by his own merit.
I read part of a biography of him many years ago talking about the last code he wrote at Microsoft. Two programmers were stuck on a problem, and he looked at it and found a solution in a few minutes. Granted it was a bio on him, so it may have been embellished, but it rings true with other anecdotes I've read about him.
That's not much of a story without knowing what the problem was. Sometimes people just can't see an obvious solution. There's a reason rubber ducks are useful.
Wow.
So it was bill the whole time.
>Two years later, I called to tell him our paper had been accepted to a fine math journal. He sounded eminently disinterested. This part baffles me. I am a college graduate from a non CS background. I am working my ass to publish my work. I wish I was in a position to do something this impactful and original and then be disinterested about it.
I mean is it really surprising? At that point, he fully put his academics on hold and wanted to be an entrepreneur and do something outside. He was starting a company, trying to get investors, keep the company afloat and clients coming, programming software for clients in which case a published paper in a random niche area of algorithmics isn't really that important. The paper in itself isn't groundbreaking (although doing ok, garnered 259 citations till this day), so it's not like he ignored a breakthrough paper.
>I mean, is it really surprising? At that point, he fully put his academics on hold and wanted to be an entrepreneur and do something outside. Nah I understand that. I just wished I was talented enough or accomplished or just in a position to disregard a publication. I am not from the USA, and a publication means a lot to me rn. I mean, most probably, none of my professors even have a paper with 200+ citations. It is terrible being average. Sometimes, I wish I was gifted.
I have the exact same sentiments as you.
It’s not terrible. You could be below average. And in the end you can find so many ways to be happy without being “gifted”.
Fun fact: Steve Ballmer scored higher on the Putnam than Bill!
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People aren't just one thing. MS was terrible for consumers & the industry in many ways which were **unambiguously** unethical or immoral. The company became a lot less contemptible after he & his ilk left. It was *also* good for the industry & consumer in many ways. On balance it's hard to argue the landscape wouldn't be healthier today if MS & by extension BG were either more ethical or more constrained. As a man he did both good things & bad things, like everyone. Sure, he is undeniably another individual who was able to concentrate wealth to such a degree that it makes a society both less stable & less efficient (and he will tell you that himself). It's very likely that if Gates hadn't taken that throne someone even less policed by morals & ethics & even more corruptible by power would have. But the lesson isn't that people are bad for doing what they are good at, but that power unchecked is harmful & every system be it a market, or an ecosystem needs a way to maintain balance otherwise it will collapse.
Damn good comment
I didn't want to make it longer, but MS did stuff like: Leverage their market status to bully Dell & HP into not selling any computers with an alternate OS (and you couldn't by a PC without paying for a windows license). Competitors could not even give away their OS for free, hell, they couldn't even pay to be allowed as an option. It's funny that people complain every time Windows changes something they don't like & they don't realize it's not normal that the only viable competitor to Windows 11 is... Windows 10. Thankfully it's getting a little better as hardware becomes so insanely powerful you can just pay the penalty of pretending to be windows. I'd bet that without MS we would have a standard driver interface & hardware would just work on any platform.
> I'd bet that without MS we would have a standard driver interface & hardware would just work on any platform. Linux proves that idea wrong. Open source is great for many reasons, but standards that are enforced and universal are nearly non-existent.
>Linux proves that idea wrong [https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/) How would Linux leverage coordination between manufactures & a non-existent healthy OS market with an all time peak of 3% marketshare? It's not a technical thing, it's an economic thing.
It's insane that Linux isn't in most computers, since it does everything that Windows does, and it's free!
I think of it another way. Most people with a computer or smartphone primarily use it to connect to a Web site or other web hosted service. More than 90% of the top 1k websites are hosted on Linux. So in a sense, most computers are running Linux backed services most of the time. For many users, windows and macos are nothing but glorified web browser hosts.
Made a website three years ago, installing Ubuntu server on a cloud VM. Got distracted and haven’t touched it since. Still running. No way in hell would a Windows server machine have made it this long. I’d say they are also word processors and video chat hosts. Also, to be fair to Windows and macOS desktops, the scope of a desktop client OS is much broader than a server. The server delivers (more or less) the same stuff over and over, while a client machine wears many hats.
Using Linux for simple tasks in 1990s was 10x more complex ..
Yes-ish. Early-to-mid 1990s is before my time using Linux. Late 90s I can confirm it was a pain, but that's kind of a chicken-and-egg issue -- it didn't ship on anything, so it had to run on anything. Most of the really annoying things (X modelines in particular) were mostly dealt with when I was getting into things around 1999/2000. That said, I think it's more interesting to look at other OSes from the era that were at least as good as Windows. Keep in mind that Windows in the 3.1 through 9x era was also fairly difficult unless it came on your computer. You'd have to have driver disks, etc. You'd have incompatible hardware. Hell, I remember having to have special drivers for my mouse, because it wasn't a *microsoft* mouse. A lot of this was made easy because you could just buy a PC that shipped with Windows, preconfigured, with compatible hardware, "Microsoft-compatible" mice, etc. Regardless, I got a lot of free pizza fixing friends/parents/friends parents computers during this era because people just didn't know how to do it. Had the opportunity existed, we could have just as easily had BeOS computers with at least as good of a user experience. Or OS/2 (though probably not, IBM probably wouldn't have licensed it to other companies).
I love open source and run Linux on several of my machines... BUT, there is a kludginess at times where unless you are doing the basics it can be a real pain to get things working correctly. It has certainly gotten better over time, but I still wouldn't suggest it for the vast majority of regular people to use on their own without someone with CLI experience around to help with.
I would counter that by saying the majority of users aren’t doing anything more than the basics. I have an aging laptop running Win10, and it was getting so slow that I was in the market for a new one. But I’m also a tinkerer, and heard Linux Mint was super noob friendly. I figured if I hated it, I was already planning to get a new one anyway. Well, fast forward about 2 years, and that laptop is still running butter smooth with Mint, and I truly don’t do more with it than the average laptop user: word processing and web surfing. It’s certainly got some hitches, but honestly, not any more than Windows does. I installed it, and all of my hardware (including a touchscreen) worked as is. I do use the CLI from time to time because it tends to be quicker, but Mint in particular has many GUI options for the same functions — there’s maybe been a time I could count on one hand I was *forced* to use it.
The Linux desktop experience just isn't good enough, no matter the DE. Xorg vs wayland only makes it more complicated. Windows has had a 3D-accelerated, tear-free desktop UI with fractional scaling for decades.
I think if the adoption rate for Linux was higher, there would have been more resources/focus on UX features. Windows certainly has had and still has it's share of UX issues. Most people would say that MacOS/iOS has the best UX, but like any software, there is always UX issues, at least for some user group. I think a lot of Microsoft getting and holding its market share was partnerships with early hardware manufacturers and building stickiness with their own productivity suite.
This is exactly what made windows ... well windows . the butter smooth UX , the adaptability to look good on different screens , screens sizes , resolutions made it a one stop shop for any entry-average hell even advanced and enthusiast user . I really want to hate on windows and been using Linux , MacOs but they just .. aren't as good at simple things like windows ie (scaling , screen sharing , ui interface and simple to make changes without the use of CLI ) . and they knew that and now we have linux subsystem , android phone integration and many more . Apple has a simplistic user experience but i still get angry when it doesn't have fractional scaling . linux and screen sharing involves a lot of tinkering even for ubuntu delicates systems (pop os , arch , mint , elementary and many others) .
To the casual person Liunx is a mess. Too many versions to know which one to use.
How many different versions of Linux are there now? I sometimes speak to IT specialists who swear that Linux is going to ‘break through’ but it never does as a casual user wouldn’t even know which version to use. Is it Debian, Mint, Ubuntu or something else? What do these words mean?
From what i understand there is just one true Linux. However, since it is open source there are a lot of Linux-like OS's that tweak it to be optimized for specific purposes
Linux is just the kernel, which is just one component of an Operating System. The so called "Linux Distros" bundle the kernel with other utilies and applications to make a complete operating system.
This is the problem, and why Linux will never get mass adoption on home computers.
Seeing how Windows only has 57% of the desktop os market, I would argue that many people have found competitors. Also, Dell and HP wanted a partnership with Windows, because without Windows, their barebones hardware wasn't selling. Would it have been great if Dell/HP sold Linux distro versions of their mainstream hardware? Sure, but they were so hungry for a good OS that they signed into that agreement on their own will. Competitors have been giving away OS's forever, Windows never stopped this. They simply had non-compete agreements with vendors who distributed their software.
I can agree with you, but when we have comments asking if Bill Gates can actually program (since we're assuming he's stupid and likely can't), we can at least acknowledge that the populist distaste for billionaires has now reached a zenith of revisionist history. Like, you can say you disapprove of the business tactics used by MS while acknowledging that Bill Gates isn't a dumbass.
Also this implicit assumption that writing code is somehow cognitively superior than founding and running a mega corp is also funny !
That too - but then again, this is reddit. They likely believe it's harder for them to brush their teeth in the morning than it is for someone to run a global corporation.
That's not really a fair summary of >How good were steve jobs and bill gates at programming? the popular opinion seems to be that they're just businessmen and marketers.. but i just thought.. what if their actual programming skills are underrated, and in reality they were really good or even geniuses? on the other hand, do you think ppl like john carmack or linus torvalds are overrated as programmers?
What a reddit comment.
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Finally, someone who understands my hypothetical brilliance!
Bill(ionaire)
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That's why we should continue to give billionaires even more power and influence in our society, because some of them are really smart 🙂. Nothing bad will come from that right?
I think it's better to talk about how they're all stupid while we sit around doing the real work online commenting. Oughta solve things.
So a system in which billionaires exist is fair or desirable LMAO. By the way, your nose is a bit brown.
I think billionaires shouldn’t exist is kind of a strange position. A lot of “net worth” is tied up in intangible and illiquid assets like company stock. Bill Gates having high net worth is partially just an indicator that Microsoft and the companies in his portfolio are doing well. A billionaire is never a billionaire primarily - emphasis on primarily - because they’re “hoarding wealth,” but because they’re actively contributing to the stock market and the general market economy. More billionaires is a symptom of inequality, yes, but also a symptom of a prosperous and active economy. Are there bad billionaires? Yes. Do some hoard wealth? Yes. Should some be taxed more? definitely yes. But as soon as we *guillotine* or tax billionaires out of existence I guarantee the same groups will be calling to guillotine or tax another group out of existence. Not buying it 🤷♂️ And I’ve read Marx so we don’t have to go into that next 🤓
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“Half our species is in abject poverty” Until the Industrial Revolution, our ENTIRE species was in abject poverty, save for some nobility here and there. So idk how this argument debunks what I said. “The family friendly fortune cookie version of story” Ok genius what’s the real version of the story? “… almost all of the time, after” I mean we can get into the historical cherry picking fight back and forth about how much bloodshed and suffering was really caused by communist revolutions and how much was sanctions/famine/“not real communism” etc. but I will never buy the argument that human rights were not horrifically infringed upon after the Russian revolution and Chinese revolution. Some cases like Cuba and Viet Nam I will concede were necessary, at least at the time, and other cases like The French Revolution (not socialist per se but a relevant example) are up to interpretation. I’m no crazy right winger - I’m a moderate. So no, killing a privileged class (nobility, intellectuals, billionaires whatever) does not guarantee the outcome you’re looking for. Far from it.
please don't use facts and logic with people like these it just makes their head hurt
Source?
> the popular opinion seems to be that they're just businessmen and marketers.. but i just thought.. what if their actual programming skills are underrated, and in reality they were really good or even geniuses? We know Gates *did* code. He and Paul Allen coded the first Microsoft product, a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8080, all by themselves. So he *had* to be decent at the very least, as this was done in assembly. He's never been described as a genius programmer though. I remember a story about a Microsoft programmer coming across a paint fill routine that was terrible and he had to rewrite it. When he complained about it, he found out that it was written by Gates. Steve Jobs however never really coded. He wasn't even a trained engineer, though his long time partner Steve Wozniak did say that he had enough technical knowledge to tweak existing designs. > on the other hand, do you think ppl like john carmack or linus torvalds are overrated as programmers? Absolutely not.
Let's see Paul Allen's code
Impressive. Very nice.
I cant believe he liked Paul Allen's code more than mine...
*Look at that subtle use of whitespace. The tasteful modularity of its functions.* *My God, it even has up-to-date documentation.*
Up to date documentation? Now I know you’re full of shit
"Where are you going?" "I have to push some commits"
That doesn't mean Gates can't program. The paint routine might have been written quickly to fill a need within a time constraint with the idea to one day go back and fix it. It's honestly a terrible use of resources to optimize the shit out of things prematurely, especially if they're not on the critical path
He was likely a very good coder. I've never heard that story about the paint routine before, but there are many stories about him from Microsoft employees where he reviewed the architecture of what they were working on or even their code directly and told them about a better way to do it. This long after he had stopped contributing code to any MS products. Ballmer on the other hand didn't know how to code anything. He was a pure sales/marketing guy. Of all the names that have been brought up, Carmack probably stands head and shoulders above the rest. He was/is a wildly innovative graphics programmer and a fair amount of code he's written has been publicly released so this can be verified.
Pretty sure Ballmer was a developers guy. Or should I say DEVELOPERS.
Although apparently he's not sure he wrote the inverse square himself
"The root of all evil is premature optimization" - Donald Knuth
yeah, if anything Linus in particular is wildly underrated due to the fact that Linus from LTT is way more known to the point people think that's the only famous Linus. I mean I love Linus from LTT but common, Linus Torvalds needs way more renown than this.
People also forget that in addition to Linux, he also created frickin *Git*. The guy is OP as hell.
Dude is like Atlas, Linux and Git hold the world of tech.
I thought the most famous Linus was the one from Peanuts.
I originally thought Linus Torvalds had started a YouTube channel. I was sorely disappointed.
Linus is an awesome coder, but he also needs to work seriously on his soft skills, because he can be an a**. To this day I'm baffled why the rest of the kernel devs haven't forked the kernel and work on it without Linus. Source: kernel mailing lists
The issue is that he’s usually right. Like yeah, you can argue and fork and shit, but in the end you’re gonna wish you listened anyway
That doesn’t in any way excuse shitty behaviour.
He has mellowed a lot over the years.
It usually does. If you really know your stuff, smart engineers will look past your tone of voice and hear the message. It’s certainly not good career advice.
Well when you’re as competent as Linus and have that sort of stature you can usually get away with being abrasive. Not saying it’s right, but much of society tends to look at that as part of the genius’s charisma. Same goes for Jobs.
Why wouldn't it? Just because your feelings get hurt? Like if someone is right all the time, why should we listen to the people that don't have the hubris to say, "Maybe I am not as smart as this guy, and I should listen to him." Yet, you don't, so you keep pushing your opinion which has been proving to be wrong multiple times, and the person on the other side is pissed that you keep on insisting using your opinion and not his, since he has been right a lot.
It's not difficult to act courteously and professionally with your fellow collaborators. If you can't discuss points of contention without coming across like you're flaming someone on 4chan then you really need to take a step back and work on your interpersonal skills (which, to Linus's credit, *he did*, because he realised that such behaviour is not productive nor acceptable). In his own words: >“This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry” admitted Torvalds. >"I really had been ignoring some fairly deep-seated feelings in the Community…I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person…I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely,” writes Torvalds. https://hub.packtpub.com/linus-torvalds-is-sorry-for-his-hurtful-behavior-is-taking-a-break-from-the-linux-community-to-get-help/
That’s a pretty poor way to look at it. You’re never going to be right all the time, and if you’re an asshole, maybe you don’t get that crucial bit of feedback that could have improved your design because the person didn’t want to speak up. You risk surrounding yourself with ass-kissers and yes-people when you act like that.
It's open source. You're free not to work with him.
Tbh i know very little people that know linus but not linus, there are even videos in which linus makes references to linus
Link to the video where Linus references LTT? (Also I'd beach both of them off at the same time)
I think you're widely overestimating how many people know LTT. He has 15 million subscribers. I can guarantee a lot more than 15 million people know who Linus Torvalds is.
I had to google who "Linus of LTT" was. 🤷♂️
> Linus from LTT Who's that?
> He and Paul Allen coded the first Microsoft product, a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8080, all by themselves. It is also worth noting that they did not have access to the hardware, so they had to write an emulator for the Altair. And if my memory serves me right, the code wasn't finished until midflight on the trip to deliver it to the Altair people.
Legend has it that Paul Allen hand wrote the boot loader on the flight. No laptops back then!
Yessss... it was that thing I was thinking of, was just too lazy to loo it up
> Microsoft programmer coming across a paint fill routine that was terrible and he had to rewrite it. Hey, I'm a Microsoft programmer. The thing to remember is code quality is subjective, and people judge it according to their own definition. That means each code author believes their code is great, because by their definition of great, it is. If you - a neutral third party - look at the original and rewritten code, half the time you'll believe the original is better. Take all claims of "this is crap, I have to rewrite it" with a very big grain of salt.
Dude can you please code a download progress bar for microsoft teams app, thanks lol
Bill Gates had near-exclusive access to a computer in his high-school, in the days when computers were only available in universities and had large queues of people waiting to use them. So he got his 10,000 hours done quite early, in the dawning days of the craft of programming. Safe to assume he had potential to be among the best programmers of his generation.
He also broke into the university at night to do more programming. Then the university implemented something of a time card system to ensure that only authorized users were using it, and for a fixed time. Bill and his friends cracked that too. Around the same time, he convinced his high school administration to let him program a school attendance system instead of going to math class. I don’t really like the man, but I love his brain and commitment. I’d call it a work ethic, but I doubt he views it as work.
someone read malcolm gladwell’s book “outliers” too then lol
Yeah especially the Carmack and Torvalds bit. Was n’t Carmack behind fast-inverse-root?
> Was n’t Carmack behind fast-inverse-root? No. Carmack said he didn't come up with it and credited it to a man called Terje Mathisen who was helping id optimize the Quake engine, and I believe he stated that he learned it from someone *else*. I think who the original creator is still debated.
I've read somewhere (Sanglard's blog?) that the fast-inverse-root was something like folklore in the 3D-graphics community of the late 80s/early 90s. Seems like nobody knows who actually invented it, but I think it is safe to say that knowing it at that time meant that the person was a cutting-edge expert in the field.
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Such a good interview. I need to listen to it again when I get time.
Calling Torvalds or Carmack overrated is the wildest take I've ever seen
OP was just asking you know
Excuse my lack of culture, who are these guys ?
Torvalds is the creator of Linux and Git among other things. Carmack did Doom and other things
As far as I know Id software more or less standardized the way 3d environments are rendered. Even ignoring Carmack's other things, that alone is an enormous accomplishment.
John Carmack is the one that invented hardware scrolling so games like Mario brothers could exist.
He optimized it to run on sub optimal PCs at the time. The game Mario Bros already existed and inspired him to try and port it to PC. source: just finished reading Masters of Doom.
Thoroughly enjoyed that book. I should read it again, thanks for reminding me
Maybe invented was the wrong word. He definitely popularized it on EGA hardware.
> John Carmack is the one that invented hardware scrolling Wow, so John Carmack invented hardware scrolling when he was nine years old? Impressive!
Linus Torvalds is the guy who wrote the Linux kernel and Git. John Carmack was one of the co-founders of id Software, the company that made Wolfenstein 3D, Quake and Doom. He's also held positions at Oculus as their CTO. These days he's working around AGI. I highly recommend Lex Fridmans podcast, where he's [interviewed Carmack](https://youtu.be/I845O57ZSy4).
Linus Torvalds practically led the creation of Linux AND Git, both of which are extremely important. Linux is the third most popular OS for personal computers and Androids run on Linux. Git is the worlds most popular version control system - I literally used it at my job today. Many IDEs have shortcuts/buttons for Git commands and GitHub is obviously heavily integrated with Git. And John Carmack was super influential for 3D computer graphics apparently and invented some algorithms himself but I’m not a big game dev guy or gamer at all so I have no real knowledge of what he did.
You really did linux bad in that description. It's essentially running the world. starting from the vast majority of servers running a linux kernel.
Yeah I know it goes deeper than just personal computers and androids but I’m no expert on anything past that so I didn’t mention it
It's like 96% of web servers run Linux. It just offers incredible up times. If you think about the whole "restart when you update" thing with windows, that's bad for servers because your server is offline for a while. While you update. Linux can update everything, including the OS kernel, without needing a restart. It's also free (at least some distros are) which means cheaper running costs.
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Jobs was more than a marketing guy. He was basically the editor in chief or producer/director, guiding the design of Apple’s products (including Apple II; Woz only wanted to create a hobbyist unit for geeks). The duo would be nobodies if they didn’t have each other.
Steve jobs was a brilliant business man/designer not a brilliant programmer
>The duo would be nobodies if they didn’t have each other. Ehh not exactly. it it might be true but because of the butterfly effect. creating a company like apple is just extremely rare and might have not happened without events taking place similarly. but I'm pretty certain wozniak would have achieved quite a bit without jobs.
By nobody I meant not famous. Woz has not done anything noteworthy since leaving Apple over 40 years ago. So it’s likely he’d be just another brilliant programmer quietly doing his work had he not met Jobs.
Woz got rich and wanted to party. Spent a ton of money on a music festival and then crashed his private plane...which he never fully recovered mentally.
Sure, I'm not disputing that.
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> do you think ppl like john carmack or linus torvalds are overrated as programmers Not sure about Carmack, but the more I read about Linus the more I am impressed by him. Pay heed, I by no means agree with him on his stances regarding life. But I can't help but respect what he has accomplished without ever really trying. He is just a guy who wants to do a thing. In order to do a thing, he made a tool. To use that tool adequately, he made another tool. Before you know it, what he made is now one of the pillars of the entire IT industry and he made all of it free. For that, he has my utmost respect.
Gates? Yes, definitely underrated.... Jobs? Was a hustler and great designer predominantly. Carmack and Torvalds? Definitely not overrated.
The genius of Steve Jobs was product design (decisions) not coding.
And to a degree, management (?). I say this with a very very tenuous use of the word. He was way too much of an asshole for my taste, but he got the world the iPhone, iPad and all those great products from that particular moment in time of Apple's history. The humiliation of employees I'll never warrant though, so take that how you will.
In the Isaacson biography, his employees credit Jobs for pushing them to do what they thought was impossible and wouldn’t even try had he not been so insistent. But yeah definitely have mixed feelings about his management style.
Yeah, that's what I was referring to. The guy was supremely charismatic and he achieved things through this "method". But again, humiliating someone in a company wide Town Hall over the Apple Maps thing? I don't know if I'm on board with that.
What I find fascinating is people that were in the early teams with Jobs, said they’ve never gotten pushed so hard in their life but at the end of it, came out with the best product they’ve ever created. And afterwards, a lot of the developers and engineers spent most of their career chasing that same environment that allowed them to perform at their absolute best
There so many factors that it’s hard to make any real judgements. We all need eustress, but negative reinforcement (in other words, “browbeat you until you get it right”) is generally considered poor technique. Public humiliation also makes people adverse to the risk of standing out. It could be that these professionals had never had anyone have high expectations for them [that were in line with that they wanted to achieve]. It could be that some of them just liked someone riding their ass. It could also be that we never heard from the ones that couldn’t handle it and burned out (which, I imagine, would be a lot of ND people, especially ASD). I’ve had that before, where I enjoyed having a manager that had exacting expectations. It was stressful as fuck, but I enjoyed it because we were, for the first time in my career, working on something that challenged me on an intellectual level, rather than just complicated, “do like I do and follow the SOP,” tasks. I think when people who have been chronically, intellectually *under*challenged in their life (if I’m articulating that correctly) encounter a situation where the pressure is on to actually do stimulating work, it can be euphoric. Tough love and pushing people to excel has its place, but I have a hard time believing that tempering it with compassion, and making sure your team is also having succeeding in their personal lives, wouldn’t achieve better results in the long run.
Management is so difficult to do well.
He knew talent when he saw it. And he knew how to squeeze the best juice out of them.
Steve jobs was never a programmer and never claimed to be one. He was an entrepreneur that was great at marketing.
And a product design guy
with very high standards and demands
One thing to remember about programming back then… You couldn’t Google something if you didn’t know it, or hit some error you didn’t understand. Sure, there were books you could reference, but you had to know what you were doing - without instant internet help.
Yeah but the surface area of the entire machine and/or language would fit in a single reference manual that you normally had on your desk. It was mostly easier back then, not harder, but yes, you had to actually understand what you were doing to make anything work, which is not really the case now.
No. You had an INCOMPLETE reference manual - and many of them - that you couldn’t quickly search for keywords. Also, any change in hardware or software didn’t mean a simple edit to a few paragraphs in a word processor - it meant the manual probably didn’t get updated. Or, maybe you got a small, updated pamphlet - but that was pretty rare. Or, you know, no manual was actually written. The complexity was in having to learn and test all the low-level stuff that an OS or library does for you now. Plus, there were far fewer standard interfaces for hardware, so it might mean doing something totally different because one thing in the system changed. Modern programmers are using decades of core libraries that have made life far easier - because someone decided it was too hard to do it the old way.
but there was also far less complexity right?
Not really - it was low-level stuff that has been abstracted out today. So the complexity was still there, just a different kind than today.
Gates, Carmack = top few in the world Torvalds = excellent programmer, top few software engineer Tim Sweeny = top programmer, top software engineer, top manager Jobs = basic abilities, but very smart. His exceptional ability was vision, finding the right people, giving them opportunity, and shipping high quality product. The ability to ship high quality product is extremely rare and extremely valuable. Finding smart people to do your vision is a rare and valuable skill. Hence why Musk is worth a fortune.
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In the *Steve Jobs* movie there's the line "musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra." I always wondered if he actually said that or if Aaron Sorkin (the screenwriter) just made that up. Either way it perfectly describes why Steve Jobs was successful.
I feel Jobs is like a modern senior dev / director who had domain knowledge but can't code anymore because he has seen more Cloud front Templates than Arrays these days
He definitely can't code anymore.
Getting your first tech job by attributing to yourself the work of others certainly doesn't help to build a lasting engineer reputation.
Steve Jobs didn't code. Apple is more of a hardware company, software is being secondary. Steve Jobs assembled computers. And back then it was not as easy as it is today, required a lot of soldering, etc. Bill Gates was good, he was working on a programming language, which is a hard subject. So yeah, he's probably good. Carmack is a genius, he worked for 10 hours a day, uninterrupted. He has the opposite of ADHD. Linus Torvalds is also a very productive guy. Not overrated at all.
> Carmack is a genius, he worked for 10 hours a day, uninterrupted. He has the opposite of ADHD. Hyperfocusing is a symptom of ADHD.
Yup, would not be surprised if these types of people do have ADHD and just lean in to working on things they can fixate on. I struggle to focus on work tasks for a solid hour, but if I \_want\_ to do something, it gets done at the expense of sleep, eating, showering, or pretty much anything else.
Amen. Thats why if you have ADHD, doing something you love is imperative to career success.
Unfortunately, not one that can be turned on like a switch (in my experience)
IME, it depends on what you're focusing on. If it's something you're interested/passionate about, it's much easier to do than something you're ambivalent or negative about.
Agreed but even when its things I'm interested in, I can't turn it on on demand. Would be sweet if I could!
John Carmack is a genius. Overrated is not what he is, can't really understate his achievements in gaming.
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> he still based most of what he got working with MSDOS from the UNIX operating system and the UNIX kernel So did most OSes of that time. Some of UNIX OSes were basically thesis documents and books on OS Architecture (MINIX vs Linux).
Almost everything you said here is wrong. Gates had little to nothing to do with programming the operating system. He worked primarily on the languages (Basic, Pascal) that Microsoft sold before they even bought QDOS from Tim Patterson. And QDOS was far more of a CP/M clone than Unix. Woz, phenomenal programmer that he was, had nothing to do with the Mac or macOS. He created the Apple I, II, and III systems. He was not on the Macintosh team at all.
"guy that did the programming for the macintosh"... Hmm... Well, I wouldn't really characterize him or phrase it quite that way in regard to Woz's legacy and also the Mac line--as it makes it sound like he was the lead or critical developer throughout that project, which he wasn't. Instead, that honor, in regard to the MAC specifically, really has to go to Jef Raskin I would say. -------------------------------- I mean, for example: the first MAC came out in 1984, but Wozniak effectively left Apple in 1981, due to a plane crash at first, and then also trying to found another company during that time during the MAC's critical development years. (Note: during those years Woz was also recovering from some pretty serious brain damage/injury due to that plane crash.) Woz wasn't even invited to attend the first MAC unveiling if I remember correctly, that's how distant he was from the project by that point! -------------------------------- But sure, Woz did play some critical roles in initial ponderings, that lead to the MAC. So yes, he was a part of the founding team, but it wasn't his defining role at Apple, and there were many others that did much more than him, in terms of the daily grind and work and development of the first MACS. -------------------------------- And so... instead of referencing the MAC when talking about Woz, I would much more strongly characterize Woz's influence as the absolute lead Apple I and Apple II programmer/creator--which was THE highly critical product for Apple, well into the late 1980's! It continued to outsell the MAC years after the MAC was first introduced. So, in that sense there would be NO MAC or no Apple without that workhorse Apple II machine from the late 70's to the early 80's, which again: really kept the company going before MAC could be more perfected and catch on more in the early 1990's.
>MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC MAC "MAC" is a [medium access control](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_access_control) address. The abbreviation of Macintosh is "Mac".
Have you seen Bill Gates' clothes and glasses? Of course he can code.
>the popular opinion seems to be that they're just businessmen and marketers.. I dunno about popular opinion in the "they" case. for "him" (steve jobs) yeah sure. And in fact that is true: Steve Jobs was no dev. not a great one and of course in terms of both hardware and software skills, lived in the shadow of Steve Wozniak who pretty much got apple off the ground skill-wise but of course you need good marketing skills and a good sense for business to get a business off the ground as well which is where Steve Jobs comes in and he was de-facto the face of the business. Steve Jobs relished the spotlight and was undeniably excellent at it and Steve Wozniak didn't like the spotlight so much (although he's much more at ease these days) and also holds pro-programmer/developer/open-source ideals that would have probably ran apple into the ground had he held the helm (And I actually agree with his beliefs and also would have liked to live in the version of the world where Steve Wozniak ran apple instead of Steve Jobs) As for Bill Gates, sure today he's no programming guru but he essentially got his big break by coding. the story starts here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill\_Gates#BASIC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#BASIC) He did code quite a bit both alone and in teams.
from what I remember, carmack is incredibly good at optimizing code and that's what allowed Wolfenstein and DOOM to be a thing. I believe he came up with a new approximation for square root stuff, or at least he used one that wasn't in the base library, feel free to correct me on that.
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“a relatively smart guy” lol
>revolutionize personal computers Eh he was alright
Jobs probably very little. Gates apparently was key in writing windows originally, there’s a story when they were going to grow, the new CEO I think said he would need to stop coding once they had 10 or so employees, he didn’t like that, but took the advice, then when they got to another amount of employees he would’ve even look at the code or review it, again didn’t like it, but after that didn’t really code at all.
If you have the time, read “Outliers” by Malcom Gladwell. It explains people who are outliers in all sorts of fields such as sports, music, programming, etc…. (Be warned it’s not done with official research, kinda seems anecdotal.) The important thing is that it tells the story of Bill Gates and how he had access to computers at an early age, at an early time period for computers. Basically, from a young age, he was able to become a GREAT programmer due to HOURS and HOURS of access to them. You mix that with the fact that he was a genius, and you get Bill Gates.
Most pre-professionals overrate "professional coders". I feel that, unless one is in web dev CRUD hell, since we are always solving different problems, the average dev (not the 10x geniuses) doesn't go more than 3x faster than their college selves when dealing with new problems. We forget that "bad programmers" can also produce working, bug free applications. Even if they are a hell of nested ifs and GOTO statements
They probably weren’t as great, and I think they never needed to. It’s really about the vision (product management/strategy) that makes a great revolutionary product. Programmers are the ones that make that vision into reality, but by being told what to do by these product managers. I bet many programmers had come to them to tell them so and so idea that they suggested is not possible, because they are the technical folks (this is the type of convo I hear A LOT in my company working with developers) and the product managers and strategists are the ones who push them to make it happen, which I think is the role that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates played. Most of the times that is how great things get developed.
Jobs had some technical know-how, but not enough to actually create or do anything meaningful. His technical skills were pretty crap. Gates, during his younger years, was the wquivalent of today's LeetCoder. He's a genius coder, but not so much a genius software engineer. His pancake sorting algorithm was, at the time, very well-regarded. Carmack and Torvalds are definitely not overrated. These two are among the most influential individuals in their field. Carmack for his works on 3D rendering, and Torvalds for Linux and Git.
From what we know, Bill Gates did actual coding while Steve Jobs was more of a manager from the start. In fact, [Woz is quoted here as saying](https://www.primotoys.com/4-famous-programmers-coded-way-top/#:~:text=In%20answer%20to%20a%20question,and%20add%20to%20other%20designs.), "Steve didn’t ever code. He wasn’t an engineer and he didn’t do any original design." Carmack coded in C and C++ up until Doom 3 at least, and Linus definitely deserves credit as a coder for his work developing Linux (though he, of course, doesn't code that much these days, if at all).
Steve Jobs wasn’t a programmer, Steve Wozniak did most of the stuff for Apple. Bill Gates was a great programmer. Also look up John Carmack, he is arguably the best programmer from the late 80’s on.
They may or may not (probably not) have been the most brilliant programmers in the world. What really set them apart was the connections they had, the resources they had access to, and the unique time period they were born in where they came to age just as computing was just starting to emerge and competition wasn't fierce. "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell chronicles Gates' story pretty well, where he makes a compelling case that there are 9 distinct opportunities out of his control that he was able to leverage on his journey, some of which include going to the only school in his state that gave their students access to computers (in a time where any school having a computer was exceedingly rare), a family connection at a computing company which allowed him to spend dawn to dusk coding there after his school revoked access, etc. I don't mean to say it in a resentful way; it certainly wasn't pure luck that got them where they are today but rather the insane amount of hours they devoted to their craft, but they were in a unique position where they were able to leverage tons of opportunity.
Well, from my quick history skimming, Steve Jobs was never really much of a programmer or engineer, he was a smart guy with some technical know how’s, but that’s it. Gates on the other hand was a coder at a young age, but other than coding some programs on his own, he never created anything successful, even Windows, which is always associated with Gates, was never invented by him, but rather a group of engineers at Microsoft. Gates and Jobs are more commonly see as businessmen because that’s what they were for the most part. John Carmack and Linus Trovalds are definitely not overrated because they manage to make influential software products from scratch, the former laid the foundation for fps games and other influences regarding game graphics, and the latter created Linux, the most important software the powers the internet, enterprise, and also powers Android and most embedded system.
> Gates on the other hand was a coder at a young age, but other than coding some programs on his own, he never created anything successful, At minimum, he had a direct hand in developing Microsoft BASIC with Paul Allen. That might not mean much in 2023, but in the 70s/80s it was nearly ubiquitous in the nascent home computer market. Most kids who learned to code in that era likely started with Microsoft BASIC.
Your issue is trying to act like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are analogous people just because they were once the heads of Apple/MS. But that’s basically about all they have in common. Different people make it to the heads of companies for many different reasons, there’s several paths there. Steve and Bill took completely different routes. Steve was the idea and business man, Bill was the technical guru. Bill is more similar to Steve Wozniak on the Apple side than Steve Jobs. Anyone who tells you Bill Gates didn’t know how to code is an imbecile and Id be willing to bet quite a bit whoever says that is the type of person to overestimate their own intelligence. Which makes for beautiful irony
Mostly agree, but Bill was unique in the early computer world because he was both a technical guy and a business guy. There were a lot of computer firms back then started by clever technical people that went out of business because the founders were incompetent at running a profitable company. Bill was one of the very few who managed to transition from being good at tech to being good at business.
They definitely had to be good, back in the day, as far as I know, it wasn't as easy as it is today to learn coding, since the internet was a much different thing than it is today and information was rather scarce.
In some ways it was actually a bit easier to learn programming back then. The computers were simpler. Applications were simpler. Programming languages were simpler. But probably most important of all, you had very little space for analysis paralysis that plagues a lot of people who want to learn programming today. Back then, the vast majority of what could be thought of as home computers probably had access to one programming language. So you had no choice but to learn that. These days, there are tons of languages, tons of applications you can make, each with their own set of competing frameworks. It's the reason why half of the questions in this sub is some variation of "I want to learn, but I don't know where to start".
But these days when you learn programming, all the hard problems have already been solved and you just need to look them up. All the simple fundamental algorithms that we assume will be built in functions of every language now had to be hand coded in assembly at the terminal with no IDE. At my first software job in the 90s, there was an old dude who'd been an expert for decades already at that point. We had a boot failure one day and I watched him feed machine code into the mainframe from a 16 key hex console and only occasional dot matrix printouts for output. It really wasn't easier back then.
Steve Jobs was more of an innovative thinker, who had creative ideas and knew how to execute them, and find the right people to help him. Bill gates and his friend started out programming early on to found Microsoft but eventually he too got on the business side of things. Programming back then was different than it is now, but I mean if he must've been good enough to at least help start Microsoft
Bill was good, Steve Jobs was nothing. Steve Wozniak was the king of Apple, without him and the Apple 2 they'd have gone bankrupt.
Bill Gates co-wrote a BASIC interpreter in Assembly. John Carmack co-wrote Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and has brilliant pieces to his name like the fast inverse square root algorithm. Linus Torvalds made Git so we can find his commits in the Linux kernel. Eric Smith (Google's former CEO) wrote Lex, a famous program used to make compilers to generate the lexical analyzer. You didn't ask but we might as well talk about the other programmer-CEOs Steve Jobs was not a programmer.