

GW-Basic creator Greg Whitten on Joel Spolsky and other MS things - nickb
http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctech/2005-April/042999.html

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alecco
More HN catching with top stories from Reddit. The proggit discussion has many
insights.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/82s16/has_joel_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/82s16/has_joel_spolsky_been_honest_about_his_time_at/)

    
    
      The context is important. First, it is in reply to this, which quotes Spolsky as:
        "This seemed to piss off a guy named Greg Whitten who headed up the App Architecture
        group. Now, Greg was something like Microsoft employee number 6. He had been around
        forever; nobody could quite point to anything he had done but apparently he had
        lunch with Bill Gates a lot and GW-BASIC was named after him."
      Second, the post to the mailing list itself is a forward of a private e-mail
      from Greg Whitten. I can't see if he said anywhere he was okay with making
      it public.
    

More HN catching with proggit top stories.

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sfk
I hope that John Foust had Dr. Whitten's permission to publish this apparently
_private_ mail. To the people who say that Whitten is arrogant or bitter,
please read Joel's disrespectful comments first:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles>

"This seemed to piss off a guy named Greg Whitten who headed up the App
Architecture group. Now, Greg was something like Microsoft employee number 6.
He had been around forever; nobody could quite point to anything he had done
but apparently he had lunch with Bill Gates a lot and GW-BASIC was named after
him."

~~~
alecco
Directory Listing Denied

~~~
old-gregg
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles/TwoSt...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles/TwoStories.html)

------
BigZaphod
Interesting, but it read as kind of arrogant to me. Or perhaps bitter? I can't
tell. Anyone else get that vibe?

~~~
michael_dorfman
Definitely. It's hard to sit comfortably with passages like "Unfortunately,
for Microsoft and .NET, I left the company in 1998. The .NET team made a
number of significant mistakes."

~~~
tjogin
Yeah, especially considering how much more of a nightmare COM and the rest of
the .NET predecessors were which he was involved with, as compared to .NET,
which he wasn't.

Maybe he's spot on, maybe not. But one thing is for sure; his story does not
contain a trace of humility.

------
smokinn
The part about Spolsky, if true, is interesting because Joel obviously doesn't
see some of the decisions he made at Microsoft as wrong since he's still doing
the same thing.

"He made other similarly stupid decisions like creating a custom programming
interface for BASIC in Excel instead of sharing a common interface as strongly
recommended. "

Did anyone else think of his special Fog Creek internal programming language?

I particularly like this article that says you should only write new
production code in a language lots of people know and others have lots of
experience in and then ends with we don't though.
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html>

~~~
tptacek
You know, "meh". This is basically like saying, "when he was at Microsoft,
Spolsky traded off the vision of a grand unified scripting architecture for
all Microsoft products in favor of something that the Excel team could
actually execute on and launch. Later on, when he founded Fog Creek, he
allowed a developer to write a custom scripting language to implement common-
codebase cross-platform, rather than waiting for the industry to come up with
a totally acceptable cross-platform development environment". He sounds
consistently pragmatic, if perhaps a bit inelegant.

~~~
rbanffy
"when he founded Fog Creek, he allowed a developer to write a custom scripting
language to implement common-codebase cross-platform, rather than waiting
using one of the many totally acceptable cross-platform development
environment readily available"

There. Fixed it.

------
jsdalton
Why is everybody gossiping -- both here and on proggit -- about a discussion
list thread from April 2005?

(Yes, it's a rhetorical question, but if there's a reason why this has
suddenly become timely I'd actually like to know.)

~~~
fh
> (Yes, it's a rhetorical question, but if there's a reason why this has
> suddenly become timely I'd actually like to know.)

That I can answer. In a recent episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Joel
Spolsky mentioned that old Excel Basic story as an example of dealing with
self-declared software architects. Unfortunately, I don't remember the exact
episode number and the transcription wiki doesn't have it yet. But he
basically didn't say anything that he hasn't already said in his "Two Stories"
article (link below).

(I don't know if this new discussion is particularly interesting or relevant,
but that's why it suddenly erupted.)

Links:

Stack Overflow blog/podcast: <http://blog.stackoverflow.com/>

Transcription wiki: <https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/?W4>

Old Joel article: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/TwoStories.html>

~~~
jsdalton
Ah, cool, that does actually answer the question. Thanks!

------
tptacek
There are C++-style "vtables" (they're called "switch structures") in the
original Unix code.

~~~
dfox
There probably are even earlier examples of exactly same concept. For example
Sketchpad comes to mind...

~~~
zmimon
It would be surprising to me if someone didn't build this concept with valves
and vacuum tubes before 'software' even existed. People always quote it as
some major milestone like the invention of the wheel or something but it
honestly seems to me like a natural and obvious design that just about anybody
comes up with when faced with the right set of problems to solve.

------
watt
Yeah yeah, well Joel is not fan of those "Chief Software Architects" at
Microsoft either. If you listen to the #44 stackoverflow podcast, he really
disses those "architect" types.

<http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/podcast-44/>

------
leej
If BillG has eaten lots of lunches with him then he should have been some guy
for BillG and Co at least.

------
shimi
I was so happy that Microsoft moved from OLE - COM to the .NET

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lucumo
It was mostly about Greg Whitten and what he did at Microsoft...

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tphyahoo
This just goes to show how important is to be nice ALLLL the time on the
internet.

The one time JS is a douche, he gets called on it big time, and there's
nothing he can say to make himself seem like less of a douche.

I am sure JS and GW are both perfectly fine people if you sit down with them
for a cup of coffee, and if they randomly sat next to each other on a plane
they'd probably get along fine too.

Stuff you write stays on the internet forever.

~~~
tptacek
Spolsky seems to get around this problem by not giving a shit when people on
Proggit decide that he's a douche.

