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Sometime around 1980-81 I had a part time job while an undergraduate in college doing system programming/admin for the Caltech High Energy Physics department.

by tzs 1mo ago

Sometime around 1980-81 I had a part time job while an undergraduate in college doing system programming/admin for the Caltech High Energy Physics department. Rob Pike was the system programmer/admin before me when he was a grad student in high energy physics, but he left to go work at Bell Labs. One day another student, Karl Heuer, and I both were engaging in the common programmer pastime of complaining about the screen editors of the day and saying we could write something better. Somehow this turned into a competition, and we both spent all night racing against each other writing our editors. It was mostly silent except for the typing, interrupted by the occasional announcement of some feature that was now working to hopefully rattle the other. In the morning the other student system programmer/admin, Norman Wilson, got in and saw what Karl and I had been up to. Norman mentioned this in an email to Rob Pike. His response was something close to this: > Everyone writes a screen editor. It's easy to do and makes them feel important. Tell them to work on something useful. It was only a couple years or so later that Rob Pike wrote a screen editor. I wonder if it made him feel important? :-)

bigiain 1mo ago
I was hoping for this to end with "I wrote emacs, and Karl wrote vi."
- LtWorf 1mo ago
  If Rob Pike is in the story, it happened like yesterday.
- NooneAtAll3 1mo ago
  [flagged]
- tzs 1mo ago
  Hah. Those were some of the screen editors we complained about. Emacs was popularly said to stand for "(e)ight (m)egabytes (a)nd (c)constantly (s)wapping". (8 MB is small by today's standards, but back then it was big. I believe CITHEP's VAX 11/780 was either 4 MB or 8 MB). I don't remember what we didn't like about vi. At the time most of us were not using any screen editor. We were using the version of QED [1] that Tom Duff, Rob Pike, Hugh Redelmeier, and David Tilbrook had ported to Unix. If anyone is curious Karl's editor was named "ted", for "(t)ext (ed)itor". This was surprisingly bland because Karl was known for coming up with great names. For example when the undergraduate hackers who used Caltech's PDP-10 decided to agree on some standards for things like command switch conventions, Karl named the group working on that: the Organization to Define Definitive Hacks Against Catastrophic Kludges, AKA the odd hack committee. Mine was named "smegma", for something like "(s)ophisticated (m)odern (e)ditor with (g)lorious (m)acros (a)bilities". (I don't think I ever did actually get macros in).
bruckie 1mo ago
Here's Rob's editor (or at least one of them): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)
- solarexplorer 1mo ago
  Here is another one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_(text_editor) I have used both editors quite a bit and did like both of them.
  - NetMageSCW 1mo ago
    Those were both amazing but so very niche.
socksy 1mo ago
It's amazing just how many stories of Rob Pike seem to show him being both a dick and wrong
- dist-epoch 1mo ago
  He created Go because he believed that the average Google programmer is too stupid to program in C++, and he didn't like Java, the other language created to address this problem.
  - atherton94027 1mo ago
    Honestly could you blame him for not liking Java in 2007? Between the many layers of abstractions the frameworks used, the exceptions and the sluggishness to compile it was not a compelling stack
    - speed_spread 1mo ago
      Nothing would have prevented building a nice, lightweight system in Java in 2007 had one thrown away the conventions that had infested it at that point. Java's problem never was the language which has been as serviceable as any other since the JDK1.4 days. It is straightforward to compile (no metaprogramming, type erased generics), linking is delayed to runtime and dependencies are all precompiled to bytecode which _should_ make for very fast builds. The problems came from the multitude of Internet-bubble era tool vendors which overcomplicated everything in order to sell high priced "corporate-level" solutions and imposed that certain coding style. Java is still known for this today because it appears in so many vintage codebases and is still being applied by coders who never revised their practices from 22 years ago. My theory is that Rob Pike was jealous of Java because it has succeeded with a model similar to his own Inferno (bytecode, C syntax) and this aligned with Google's ask of developing something that would be outside of Sun's lawyers reach.
      - cmrdporcupine 1mo ago
        Java and the JVM does show its age specifically in one era, and that is its OO-dogmatism which it inherited from the 1990s OO wave (i-was-there-gandalf.gif). Even the opcode set in the VM reflects this everything-an-object mentality. While it's been made to work, the JVM itself isn't the greatest VM for hosting other non-Java-shaped languages because of this.

by tzs 1mo ago

bigiain 1mo ago

I was hoping for this to end with "I wrote emacs, and Karl wrote vi."

LtWorf 1mo ago
If Rob Pike is in the story, it happened like yesterday.
NooneAtAll3 1mo ago
[flagged]
tzs 1mo ago
Hah. Those were some of the screen editors we complained about. Emacs was popularly said to stand for "(e)ight (m)egabytes (a)nd (c)constantly (s)wapping". (8 MB is small by today's standards, but back then it was big. I believe CITHEP's VAX 11/780 was either 4 MB or 8 MB). I don't remember what we didn't like about vi. At the time most of us were not using any screen editor. We were using the version of QED [1] that Tom Duff, Rob Pike, Hugh Redelmeier, and David Tilbrook had ported to Unix. If anyone is curious Karl's editor was named "ted", for "(t)ext (ed)itor". This was surprisingly bland because Karl was known for coming up with great names. For example when the undergraduate hackers who used Caltech's PDP-10 decided to agree on some standards for things like command switch conventions, Karl named the group working on that: the Organization to Define Definitive Hacks Against Catastrophic Kludges, AKA the odd hack committee. Mine was named "smegma", for something like "(s)ophisticated (m)odern (e)ditor with (g)lorious (m)acros (a)bilities". (I don't think I ever did actually get macros in).

bruckie 1mo ago

Here's Rob's editor (or at least one of them): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor)

solarexplorer 1mo ago
Here is another one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_(text_editor) I have used both editors quite a bit and did like both of them.
- NetMageSCW 1mo ago
  Those were both amazing but so very niche.

socksy 1mo ago

It's amazing just how many stories of Rob Pike seem to show him being both a dick and wrong

dist-epoch 1mo ago
He created Go because he believed that the average Google programmer is too stupid to program in C++, and he didn't like Java, the other language created to address this problem.
- atherton94027 1mo ago
  Honestly could you blame him for not liking Java in 2007? Between the many layers of abstractions the frameworks used, the exceptions and the sluggishness to compile it was not a compelling stack
  - speed_spread 1mo ago
    Nothing would have prevented building a nice, lightweight system in Java in 2007 had one thrown away the conventions that had infested it at that point. Java's problem never was the language which has been as serviceable as any other since the JDK1.4 days. It is straightforward to compile (no metaprogramming, type erased generics), linking is delayed to runtime and dependencies are all precompiled to bytecode which _should_ make for very fast builds. The problems came from the multitude of Internet-bubble era tool vendors which overcomplicated everything in order to sell high priced "corporate-level" solutions and imposed that certain coding style. Java is still known for this today because it appears in so many vintage codebases and is still being applied by coders who never revised their practices from 22 years ago. My theory is that Rob Pike was jealous of Java because it has succeeded with a model similar to his own Inferno (bytecode, C syntax) and this aligned with Google's ask of developing something that would be outside of Sun's lawyers reach.
    - cmrdporcupine 1mo ago
      Java and the JVM does show its age specifically in one era, and that is its OO-dogmatism which it inherited from the 1990s OO wave (i-was-there-gandalf.gif). Even the opcode set in the VM reflects this everything-an-object mentality. While it's been made to work, the JVM itself isn't the greatest VM for hosting other non-Java-shaped languages because of this.