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Both of my Steves predated the pandemic, but yes, whether Zoom, face to face, or a phone call, that is excellent advice which I followed each time. Unfortunate

Both of my Steves predated the pandemic, but yes, whether Zoom, face to face, or a phone call, that is excellent advice which I followed each time. Unfortunately they were both very strong-willed, and I didn't get anywhere with either of them. I ran into the first Steve at a natural food store in Palo Alto. We got to talking about this little computer company he was starting with a friend and how they needed a 6502 disassembler. We didn't have a business deal or anything, but I was curious about the 6502 and it sounded like a fun side project, so I got to work on it. He called me a couple of days later to tell me I wasn't capable of doing it. I tried to explain that I'd written code on a variety of computer architectures and the 6502 was a fairly simple one, but he said "I'm sorry, my mind is made up. You couldn't possibly do this." I said to myself, "who is this Steve guy telling me I can't program?!" I went ahead and wrote enough of the disassembler to be a good proof of concept. Our phone call hadn't gone well, so I decided to visit their office with a printout and show him the code. It was listed at 770 Welch Road, near the Stanford Barn. When I got there, nothing looked like a computer company, there was just a row of telephone switchboards. I told one of the telephone operators I was looking for Apple Computer, and she said "um, this is their answering service." So I walked out and told myself, "These guys are flakes. They're never going to make it." The second Steve was a little less interesting. I found out about his objection to Python floats near the end of a team meeting, and he had another objection too. Some of our code would need to be written in C++ regardless, and there was no way to call C++ code from Python. I told him about CLIF and SWIG, which were both widely used at our company, and I explained the float vs. double thing. But like the other Steve, he said "my mind is made up, we have to rewrite everything in C++."

deleted 5y ago
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andi999 5y ago
Well, the second Steve case really depends on the overall outlook. If a big chunk needs to be in C++ then the question is, do you really want to have two languages at the problem? Especially if the goal is a shipable binary later (which is possible but painful in python). Also it is a question about available stuff.
- Stratoscope 5y ago
  Yes, those are valid and important considerations. In this case it didn't need to be a shippable binary, it was just run internally. We had the infrastructure to seamlessly handle a mix of Python and C++, and the team members were familiar with both languages - other than the exceptions noted above. This was a set of geographic data importers for some messy data in a variety of formats from multiple countries. The data quality was so bad that north and south were sometimes reversed, or even worse, north and west would be reversed, among many other problems. This required a lot of ad hoc code to clean up the data. It was originally written in C++, with all the data importers linked into a monolithic binary with an eight-minute build time for a one-line change. (Or a half-hour for a full build.) So if you spotted one data error and wanted to clean it up, it was an eight-minute wait to try your code. When I changed it to use a Python front end that cleaned up the data and fed it to a simplified C++ back end for the compute intensive part, the C++ code hardly ever had to be rebuilt, and there was no build time at all for the Python part. So you could explore the data interactively and easily figure out how to clean it up. Technically, this was a huge win. Socially, not so much. OTOH, if you ever interview me and ask the "behavioral" questions: "Tell me about a time when a project went really well" and then "Tell me about a time when a project didn't go so well", I can use this episode for both questions!
  - andi999 5y ago
    Thanks. I agree, this is like a textbook case when to use a hybrid approach. Maybe the manager wanted to make sure he will always have enough people assigned to the project (so make it more difficult to maintain)? (A very dark management pattern)
- adsharma 5y ago
  The idea that py2many is pursuing is to avoid having to deal with two languages and interfacing via python C-API. In other words you write your C++ or Rust with the python syntax, fixed width, signed/unsigned integer types and static typing and transpile to get the same effect as writing C++ by hand. You'd give up any dynamic features of cpython in the process.
MillenialMan 5y ago
Knowing what I know about Steve Jobs, I have to wonder whether the whole thing was a bait to get you (and everyone else he mentioned it to) into proving the concept before they signed a contract. What do you think? You reckon he was baiting you or it was an honest mistake?
- StavrosK 5y ago
  I got "Wozniak" more than "Jobs" from it, given the technical nature of the job.
  - npongratz 5y ago
    Assuming we're talking about the first Steve, it definitely sounded like Reality Distortion Field Steve, given this quote (with my emphasis): >• The Steve who told me I would never be able to write a 6502 disassembler ... (He was neither a programmer nor a hardware engineer.)
    - StavrosK 5y ago
      Oh oops, missed that, you're right.
    - Stratoscope 5y ago
      Indeed you are correct. In fact, when I was writing my comment I just said "(He was not a programmer.)" and then decided to add "nor a hardware engineer" to disambiguate. I didn't want to put in the second Steve's last name (hoping not to burn too many bridges), and I liked the parallelism of just mentioning each one by first name.
- Stratoscope 5y ago
  That is a really interesting speculation, and of course we will never know the answer. I do think it was ignorance about programming, combined with Steve's infamous arrogance. I'd programmed in machine language on a few different architectures by that time, and not just assembly but binary machine code too. To me the 6502 just looked like another instruction set. But as you might guess, I have sometimes wondered "what if" I'd pushed back more. Would I have ended up a billionaire or at least a multi-millionaire? Or would Steve have driven me to the brink of despair, as he did with a few other people? (One dear friend of mine once said in an interview, "You may find that some people who worked with Steve won't want to talk about their experience.") Or perhaps worse for the world in the long run, could my involvement have led to Apple Computer's downfall? The dirty little secret is that I didn't have a 6502 chip to test my code on, but I was working at Tymshare [1] at that time, I had a Teletype [2] machine at home, and Tymshare had a 6502 emulator that I used to test my code. Oops! What if they had gotten wind of this and sued me and/or this little Apple Computer company? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymshare [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

andi999 5y ago

Well, the second Steve case really depends on the overall outlook. If a big chunk needs to be in C++ then the question is, do you really want to have two languages at the problem? Especially if the goal is a shipable binary later (which is possible but painful in python). Also it is a question about available stuff.

Stratoscope 5y ago
Yes, those are valid and important considerations. In this case it didn't need to be a shippable binary, it was just run internally. We had the infrastructure to seamlessly handle a mix of Python and C++, and the team members were familiar with both languages - other than the exceptions noted above. This was a set of geographic data importers for some messy data in a variety of formats from multiple countries. The data quality was so bad that north and south were sometimes reversed, or even worse, north and west would be reversed, among many other problems. This required a lot of ad hoc code to clean up the data. It was originally written in C++, with all the data importers linked into a monolithic binary with an eight-minute build time for a one-line change. (Or a half-hour for a full build.) So if you spotted one data error and wanted to clean it up, it was an eight-minute wait to try your code. When I changed it to use a Python front end that cleaned up the data and fed it to a simplified C++ back end for the compute intensive part, the C++ code hardly ever had to be rebuilt, and there was no build time at all for the Python part. So you could explore the data interactively and easily figure out how to clean it up. Technically, this was a huge win. Socially, not so much. OTOH, if you ever interview me and ask the "behavioral" questions: "Tell me about a time when a project went really well" and then "Tell me about a time when a project didn't go so well", I can use this episode for both questions!
- andi999 5y ago
  Thanks. I agree, this is like a textbook case when to use a hybrid approach. Maybe the manager wanted to make sure he will always have enough people assigned to the project (so make it more difficult to maintain)? (A very dark management pattern)
adsharma 5y ago
The idea that py2many is pursuing is to avoid having to deal with two languages and interfacing via python C-API. In other words you write your C++ or Rust with the python syntax, fixed width, signed/unsigned integer types and static typing and transpile to get the same effect as writing C++ by hand. You'd give up any dynamic features of cpython in the process.

MillenialMan 5y ago

Knowing what I know about Steve Jobs, I have to wonder whether the whole thing was a bait to get you (and everyone else he mentioned it to) into proving the concept before they signed a contract. What do you think? You reckon he was baiting you or it was an honest mistake?

StavrosK 5y ago
I got "Wozniak" more than "Jobs" from it, given the technical nature of the job.
- npongratz 5y ago
  Assuming we're talking about the first Steve, it definitely sounded like Reality Distortion Field Steve, given this quote (with my emphasis): >• The Steve who told me I would never be able to write a 6502 disassembler ... (He was neither a programmer nor a hardware engineer.)
  - StavrosK 5y ago
    Oh oops, missed that, you're right.
  - Stratoscope 5y ago
    Indeed you are correct. In fact, when I was writing my comment I just said "(He was not a programmer.)" and then decided to add "nor a hardware engineer" to disambiguate. I didn't want to put in the second Steve's last name (hoping not to burn too many bridges), and I liked the parallelism of just mentioning each one by first name.
Stratoscope 5y ago
That is a really interesting speculation, and of course we will never know the answer. I do think it was ignorance about programming, combined with Steve's infamous arrogance. I'd programmed in machine language on a few different architectures by that time, and not just assembly but binary machine code too. To me the 6502 just looked like another instruction set. But as you might guess, I have sometimes wondered "what if" I'd pushed back more. Would I have ended up a billionaire or at least a multi-millionaire? Or would Steve have driven me to the brink of despair, as he did with a few other people? (One dear friend of mine once said in an interview, "You may find that some people who worked with Steve won't want to talk about their experience.") Or perhaps worse for the world in the long run, could my involvement have led to Apple Computer's downfall? The dirty little secret is that I didn't have a 6502 chip to test my code on, but I was working at Tymshare [1] at that time, I had a Teletype [2] machine at home, and Tymshare had a 6502 emulator that I used to test my code. Oops! What if they had gotten wind of this and sued me and/or this little Apple Computer company? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymshare [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33