
Joel Spolsky: My First Bill Gates Review - tosh
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/
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tosh
> The Excel team convinced the Basic team that what we really needed was some
> kind of Visual Basic for Excel. I managed to get four pet features added to
> Basic. I got them to add Variants, a union data type that could hold any
> other type, because otherwise you couldn’t store the contents of a
> spreadsheet cell in a variable without a switch statement. I got them to add
> late binding, which became known as IDispatch, a.k.a. COM Automation,
> because the original design for Silver required a deep understanding of type
> systems that the kinds of people who program macros don’t care about. And I
> got two pet syntactic features into the language: For Each, stolen from csh,
> and With, stolen from Pascal.

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tosh
> Yeah, but probably an intentional one. Lotus had to fit in 640K. That’s not
> a lot of memory. If you ignore 1900, you can figure out if a given year is a
> leap year just by looking to see if the rightmost two bits are zero. That’s
> really fast and easy. The Lotus guys probably figured it didn’t matter to be
> wrong for those two months way in the past. It looks like the Basic guys
> wanted to be anal about those two months, so they moved the epoch one day
> back.”

