
An Interview with Andy Hertzfeld - state
https://www.notion.so/tools-and-craft/01-andy-hertzfeld
======
comatose_kid
I liked this quote - "I think the essential way to do anything great, you have
to have some incremental development philosophy because you're just going to
be wrong with your grand design that you don't iterate on."

~~~
bronson
"Almost always, each step I take tells me what the next step should be." (also
from the video)

~~~
contingencies
_You 're not really doing something very revolutionary if you're not running
into some dead ends._

 _You don 't have a clear idea of what it's going to be when you start, you
have an inkling and then, each step tells you what the next step is but you
don't know what the next step is until you've gotten to a certain point._

 _We thought we were making an exquisite product, the best possible thing at
the time but then, we figured, in a few years we 'd make something a lot
better, completely different. We didn't realize the architecture we were
putting in place could last five years, let alone 10, 20, 30 years._

 _I think the essential way to do anything great, you have to have some
incremental development philosophy because you 're just going to be wrong with
your grand design that you don't iterate on._

Added to
[https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)
;)

------
sulam
Telescript is still something that intuitively seems like a good idea for a
certain class of problem. In some ways, while it's a bit of a stretch, I would
argue that Map/Reduce is a different encoding of this idea -- that the code
should be mobile because the data isn't. Clearly Java was inspired by this
concept and has been quite successful, but people aren't running applets for
the most part anymore, so the one of the fundamental ideas motivating Java
turned out to be irrelevant to its success. And yet on the other hand we have
ReactNative and its equivalents sending JavaScript code off to the computers
in our pockets. Even GMail and the original AJAX concepts are a re-creation of
the Telescript concepts.

I hope Andy realizes that this idea isn't wrong so much as it was bad timing
(like the rest of what General Magic was doing). The world today has
transposed the ideas, but they're still recognizable in very successful
platforms with significant mindshare.

~~~
DonHopkins
Yes, agreed: I think he was being way too modest. It didn't turn out exactly
like they expected, but they were right about the important things, and we
still have a LONG way to go, so comparing their vision with the crap we have
now just isn't fair. I think time will prove them right (but wrong about being
wrong ;).

------
marcelluspye
Andy is the principal author of the posts on
[https://www.folklore.org/](https://www.folklore.org/) , which is all about
the development of the mac. Definitely worth going through in an afternoon, if
you're interested in that era.

~~~
pjmlp
Another useful website on the same vein is "The Long View"

[http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...](http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/The_Long_View.html)

Contains histories about Photoshop, Object Pascal, A/UX, MCL, and many other
Apple technologies.

~~~
badsectoracula
An iWeb site! I didn't end up using it much, but i still find it the most
intuitive, simple and true WYSIWYG full site making tool regardless of
platform. Too bad Apple discontinued it (although it still works in modern
macOS, i wonder for how long though), there are some alternatives but every
single one i've seen either scales down the WYISWYG part or scales up the
complexity - or both.

------
gist
My question for developers and engineers (on HN) today is this.

Do you think that people like Hertzfeld, Atkinson, Wozniak etc were super
special in the way they are portrayed? Or were they simply around at a time
when there was little competition in terms of competition? (Not saying they
don't have talent just is it godlike?

I am reminded of what I thought was 'smart' based on people in my own local
school. Then you get out in the world and you realize there are so many people
that probably have much more ability, drive etc and they appear to far exceed
what I thought was 'great'.

I think about this any time I see a field that is sparsely populated. Things
like fighting wild fires or observing things in Antartica. Not like there are
hundreds of thousands of people doing that but then from that small group you
end up with 'experts'. (And maybe they are but usually a larger number would
yield more qualified 'experts', right?)

~~~
JKCalhoun
I think it's both: right place at the right time, but so were a lot of other
people. Some rose above the rest.

Woz was a hobbyist at a time when a hobbyist could get his hobby mainstream.
There was only a year at most when you could do that with the "home computer".

------
kevintb
I love Notion, and I also love that they hosted this interview. Great
interview.

~~~
fastball
Yeah, Notion is far and above the best productivity workspace tool I've found,
and I've tried most of them.

Jealous I didn't build it myself -- I think it's going to be huge in the near
future.

~~~
kevintb
Absolutely agreed, and I think they well-deserve their fame. It's hard to do
well in this competitive space.

------
DonHopkins
I disagree that history proves them wrong about Telescript. They just had the
client/server relationship backwards (and asymmetrical).

Andy Hertzfeld: "You didn't really need to do that. Just the remote procedure
paradigm was good enough. Which is really what the web is based on. You don't
inject code into the web to do you work for you and come back to you. You just
ask a server with an http request."

It doesn't take Yakov Smirnoff to observe that now the web injects code into
you.

The remote procedure paradigm isn't good enough. That just leads to the
X-Windows Disaster.

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-
disaster-128d39...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-
disaster-128d398ebd47)

I'll argue that injecting code both ways is quite useful and extremely
powerful.

Whenever you add a script or extension to Google Sheets or Google Docs or
Gmail, you're injecting JavaScript code into a server running in the cloud.

Here's another example of how clients can inject code into servers: NFS 3.0
aka NeFS was a proposed version of NFS that put a PostScript interpreter into
the kernel, so you could download code into your file server to efficiently
perform file system operations, minimizing network traffic and even
eliminating context switching.

[http://donhopkins.com/home/nfs3_0.pdf](http://donhopkins.com/home/nfs3_0.pdf)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9271578](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9271578)

>You might get a kick out of Sun's proposal for "NFS 3.0" aka "NeFS". The
basic idea was to put a PostScript interpreter in the kernel for extensibly
and efficiently executing distributed and even local file system operations.
It not only cuts down on network transactions for the same reason NeWS and
AJAX does, but even locally you can avoid billions of context switches by
executing "find" and tasks like that in the kernel, for example.

NeFS was a great idea, but too radical for its time (Feb. 1990, soon before
Telescript), but people are finally starting to rediscover the technique with
other languages like JavaScript and Java.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7958194](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7958194)

>Runtime.JS – Operating system kernel built on V8 (runtimejs.org)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060395](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17060395)

>pjmlp 55 days ago | on: Extending Tcl

>Yes, Sun played with idea of putting a JVM on the Solaris kernel.

>DonHopkins 55 days ago

>Even 16 or so years earlier in 1990, Sun played with the idea of putting a
PostScript interpreter in the SunOS kernel.

>Like NeWS was the Network extensible Window System, so NeFS was the Network
extensible File System, or NFS 3.0.

>It was actually a great idea, just a wee bit before its time, and very poorly
named and positioned!

>This comparison of NeWS to AJAX also applies NeFS, which is like kernel NeWS
with file operations instead of a graphics library -- it also saves you lots
of user/kernel context switches even if you're not doing any networking:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS)

>NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS
coherently:

>\- used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming.

>\- used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering.

>\- used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation.

>It didn't go over very well because the unenlightened philistines of the time
couldn't get their head around an API to the file system that wasn't
compatible with creat open close read write and ioctl.

~~~
wila
Pardon me for the off topic reply, but I don't see your contact info anywhere
so will post it here:

The "recent posts" link at your website throws a lot of "Illegal string
offset" warnings at the start of the page.

------
Animats
I haven't heard him mentioned in a long time. What did he do after the Mac?

~~~
mlinksva
According to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Hertzfeld](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Hertzfeld)
...

Since leaving Apple, he has co-founded three companies: Radius in 1986,
General Magic in 1990, and Eazel in 1999. In 2002, he helped Mitch Kapor
promote open source software with the Open Source Applications Foundation.
Hertzfeld worked at Google from 2005 to 2013, where in 2011 he was the key
designer of the Circles user interface in Google+.

~~~
perl4ever
It makes me think: I wonder if Google has become the place where famous people
go to...not do much. Like, they just sequester geniuses, like so much carbon.
Shiny carbon status symbols.

~~~
badsectoracula
The Circles interface was good though, it was even adapted in an (IMO
inferior) form by Facebook. Its main issue was that it was made for Google+
that nobody wanted to use.

~~~
perl4ever
Even so, the brief summary hinted that he probably did more during an earlier
8-year stretch than at Google.

