Seibel Peter. Coders at Work
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Brad Fitzpatrick
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Seibel: What about the actual tools you use—you’re still an Emacs user,
right?
Fitzpatrick: I’m still an Emacs user. I wish I were better at Emacs. But I
know all the keystrokes but I don’t really customize it much. I steal other
people’s customizations and I can kind of read it. But I find myself getting
annoyed by something and saying, “I should go write some Elisp to bind it to
a key.” And then I don’t.
Steve Yegge is working on project to basically replace all of Elisp with
JavaScript. So I keep saying, I’ll wait for him to do that so I don’t have to
learn another language. I’ll just write it in JavaScript. I don’t mind JavaScript
as a language. It’s browsers that suck. At Google I write a lot of stuff in
JavaScript that I then embed in Java and C++. I figure JavaScript is a good
embedding language.
Seibel: Are there any tools that you are forced to use regularly that you
just hate? Other than your whole desktop?
Fitzpatrick: Yeah, the whole desktop. There are a whole lot of things on
my desktop. All these browsers are always hanging and crashing and using
tons of memory. My whole operating system hanging. My coworkers try to
tell me—if they see me doing something in Emacs—that Eclipse or IntelliJ
does it for them automatically. So every six months I try out one of them,
Eclipse or IntelliJ. And the damn thing just sits there spinning forever,
consuming memory and maybe crashes in the middle of me typing or can’t
keep up with me typing. Come on—syntax-highlight in the background or
compile in a different thread. Why are you blocking my typing to do this?
OK, I’ll try it again in six months, guys. So I’m glad I’m not forced to use
that. I should really get better at Emacs, though.
My learning curve is, I learn something pretty rapidly until I get to this point
where I’m pretty productive and good enough. Then I kind of plateau at like
maybe 90 percent or 80 percent, where I’m productive and I don’t have to
look things up and I’m happy. And then it slowly gets better after that. It’s
only after I’m supercomfortable with something that I’m like, “I’m going to
go dig around the docs for this language—the man pages—and learn every
nook and cranny.”
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Brad Fitzpatrick
86
Seibel: Is that maybe wise these days? There are so many things you could
learn. You could spend forever just learning how to use your editor, and
how much software would you write then?
Fitzpatrick: Yeah, but I’ve always found—at least for your editor—it
always pays off. Whenever I learn something, it pays off within, I don’t
know, a week or two. Whenever I write a stupid little shell script in my bin
directory, or a little Perl script, or something to automate my life, it always
pays off.
Seibel: So you’ve never gotten trapped in the pit of endless toolsmithing?
Fitzpatrick: Nah. I tend to do it for a purpose. I definitely know people
who are just always working on their personal tools and never get anything
done. I can go a little bit more in that direction and be safe, though.
Seibel: What do you think is the most important skill for a programmer to
have?
Fitzpatrick: Thinking like a scientist; changing one thing at a time. Patience
and trying to understand the root cause of things. Especially when you’re
debugging something or designing something that’s not quite working. I’ve
seen young programmers say, “Oh, shit, it doesn’t work,” and then rewrite
it all. Stop. Try to figure out what’s going on. Learn how to write things
incrementally so that at each stage you could verify it.
Seibel: Is there anything that you did specifically to improve your skill as a
programmer?
Fitzpatrick: Sometimes I’ll go out of my way to write something in a
language that I would rather not write it in—and I know it’ll take me longer
to write in that language—because I know I’ll be better in the end. Like
when I got to Google, there were a lot of times where I was writing one-off
things and I’d go to write it in Perl. Then I’d be like, “Ah, no, I should write
this in Python.” Now I write tons of Python and it doesn’t bother me—I
barely have to look things up. Perlbal was originally written in C# just to
learn that.
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Brad Fitzpatrick
87
Seibel: And are there skills apart from programming itself that you think
would-be programmers should develop?
Fitzpatrick: There’s communication, but I’m not sure that’s something you
can really practice. Deal with people on mailing lists a lot. Written
communication style goes a long way. But that’s a general life thing, right?
There was some study about who was successful after high school. Was it
the smart kids or the social kids? It turned out that it was the social kids
who ended up making all the money in life, not the people with the good
grades. I thought that was interesting.
Seibel: That seems to be a bit of a change from the past. It used to be
programmers could be gnomes hiding in an office. These days it’s all mailing
lists and collaboration.
Fitzpatrick: Well, at the places I’ve worked, either on open source or at
companies, everyone depends on each other. The motivating factor is, “I’m
going to write this code because I know you’re going to be needing it in two
weeks or I’m going to be needing yours in two weeks.” There’s always a
human level.
Seibel: People have claimed that there are orders of magnitude differences
in productivity between the best and worst programmers. Has that been
your experience?
Fitzpatrick: Yeah, but it’s probably like that in every field. It’s how much
experience you have. It’s not often the case where I know of two people
who do the same sort of programming and have been doing it the same
amount of time, but differ by a factor of ten times. It seems like if you’re not
getting better all the time, you’re probably getting frustrated and you drop
out.
I guess there are the people who just do it for a job but don’t really enjoy it.
Which is OK. But it’s kind of weird to compare those people with people
who are hardcore programmers. What’s ten times more productive when
one person works ten times the hours and thinks about it nonstop and the
other person just does it at his job?
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Brad Fitzpatrick
88
Seibel: You just mentioned taking a scientist’s approach to debugging. Do
you consider yourself a scientist, an engineer, an artist, or a craftsman?
Fitzpatrick: Either scientist or engineer. Probably more engineer. I would
say scientist was second, but only in the sense of the scientific method of
changing one thing at a time and how you diagnose problems. Engineer for
the design aspect of things. I definitely have friends who call themselves
artists or craftsmen. I’ve never thought of myself as that.
Seibel: On the other hand, there’s a lot of engineering envy in software.
You hear the jokes about, “If people built skyscrapers the way we build
software, the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.” Do you think
building software is a well-understood engineering discipline?
Fitzpatrick: No. I don’t think it’s there yet. You don’t need a license, right,
to write code. Not that I want tons of regulation, but it would be nice to
know that some of these PHP programmers with these XSS exploits aren’t
the same people writing the air-traffic-control system. I’d like there to be
some official line between those people.
I have a friend who’s a structural engineer and he went to school forever
and took all this engineering certification stuff. It’s kind of comforting to
know that the people who build the bridges I’m on studied this shit forever
and took tons of tests and stayed up all the time studying.
Seibel: But what test could you give a programmer that would give you
confidence that they can write software that will work?
Fitzpatrick: I don’t know. It’s kind of scary.
Seibel: Even without licensing, do you think programmers have any sort of
special ethical responsibilities to society? We’re arguably a profession, and
professions have codes of conduct.
Fitzpatrick: You shouldn’t kill anyone. Like with flight-control software.
But that’s kind of a rare case. I would like to ask that everyone is consistent
on their credit-card forms to like let me put in fucking spaces or hyphens.
Computers are good at removing that shit. Like don’t tell me how to format
my numbers. But there’s no ethics there. Just stupidity.
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Brad Fitzpatrick
89
Seibel: You’re 28 now. Do you have any worries that programming is sort
of a young person’s game, that you’re going to lose a step as you get older?
Fitzpatrick: No. The worst case, I could always just stop and work on fun
things on my own. I don’t feel like I’m competing with anyone right now and
I don’t really care if other people are better because I feel like there are
tons of people who are better already. I figure we are always in the middle
anyway, so I’m happy to stay in the middle.
Seibel: So programming is what you’d do for fun, even if you quit working?
Fitzpatrick: Oh, yeah. I’d still do stupid shit. I have this silly board game on
my phone. I was kind of tired—I couldn’t work on anything serious, so I
wrote a solver for that game. Tried to do some dynamic programming and
did different board sizes and did a bunch of random boards and made a
histogram of how many moves it takes to solve the board for different
board sizes. I sent it to the author because the game has a really bad
estimate of par. Basically, to advance in the game you have to do better than
par. And everyone on the mailing list was noticing that the game got easier
as you went on because his estimate of par he kind of pulled out of
nowhere. So I sent him the histograms at every board size. I think in the
new version of the game he adjusted par. That was a fun hack, just on the
shuttle home. I could retire and just do dumb shit like that all day.
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C H A P T E R
3
Douglas
Crockford
A senior JavaScript Architect at Yahoo!, Douglas Crockford has been a
programmer since the early ’70s when he took a Fortran course in college after
being unable to get studio time for his major in television broadcasting. Over the
course of his career, he has combined computers with media in various ways at
places like Atari, Lucasfilm, Electric Communities, and now Yahoo!
Crockford is, by nature, a simplifier and a tidier. He invented JSON, the data
interchange format widely used in Ajax applications, because he found XML too
complicated. His recently published book, JavaScript: The Good Parts, argues that
JavaScript is actually quite a nice language if one avoids certain features. When I
talked to him he stressed the importance of subsetting as a way of managing
complexity and described a code-reading process he uses that starts with simply
tidying up the code.
At the time of our interview, Crockford had become well known as an outspoken
critic of the proposed ECMAScript 4 (ES4) revision to the ECMAScript (JavaScript)
language standard, on the grounds that it was too complex. He was in favor of a
more modest proposal labeled ES3.1, and since then he and the other ES3.1
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Douglas Crockford
92
advocates have largely prevailed—ES3.1 has been renamed ES5, and the ES4
effort has been officially abandoned.
Crockford and I talked about what he disliked about the ES4 proposal, the
importance of code reading as a team activity, and how to move the Web forward
despite the legacy of existing systems.
Seibel: How did you start programming?
Crockford: I went to San Francisco State University. I went there because
they had a really good television program. My first year I couldn’t get into
the studio so I looked for other things to take and sort of as a fluke I took a
Fortran class in the math department. And it turned out I was really good at
it so I took the second-semester class.
That was ’71, ’72. It was punch cards in the basement of the library.
Timesharing had just come to the school. At San Francisco State we didn’t
have a strong engineering department that owned all the computers. Instead
they got distributed all over the school. Natural sciences had a lab; school of
business had a lab; school of education had a lab; and humanities had a lab.
Which was really interesting in that you had all these disciplines all playing
with computers.
I went to work first in the science lab and then in the humanities lab. So I’d
have people coming in who were economists or psychologist or
geographers—they were the most interesting people. I’d learn about the
problems that they were working on and I developed a lot of sensitivity
really early on to the concerns of normal people as they play with these
terrible machines and started looking at how we can make this stuff better
for them.
Eventually I got into the studios and did all the TV stuff and that was fun but
in the end I decided to go the computer way. But all along I spent a lot of
time thinking about the two things together. I anticipated a lot of what
would become multimedia and now digital media, and at various times in my
career I’ve gone back and done the media part and then returned to the
programming part.
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Douglas Crockford
93
Seibel: So you started with Fortran and discovered that you were good at
it. Was there anything that drew you to programming other than, “Oh, I
seem to be good at this.”?
Crockford: That’s all it was. It was my first semester, and I had to take a
math class and I had picked one of those at random and it happened to have
Fortran in it. So I didn’t go into it intending to learn how to program. It was
just what happened.
Seibel: What was the first interesting program you remember writing?
Crockford: That’s going way back. I think it was a program I wrote to
disassemble the runtime of the Fortran system on the timesharing system I
was using. By doing that, I was able to read how that system worked and
taught myself a lot about programming based on that model, something
which would not ordinarily have been published.
Seibel: What do you think is the biggest change in the way you think about
programming compared to back then?
Crockford: There was a period of maybe a decade where efficiency was
really, really important. I guess it was in the early microprocessor era when
memory was still really small and the CPUs were still really slow. We’d get
down into assembly language in order to do things like games and music to
make it fit and to make it fast. Eventually we got over that, so today we’re
writing big applications in JavaScript that run in a browser. It’s such a
profoundly inefficient environment compared to the stuff that we used to
do, but Moore’s Law sort of made it all OK.
Seibel: And is there anything that you regret about the path that you took
learning the program?
Crockford: There are some languages that I was aware of that I never got
a chance to use. I’ve read a lot about APL and I understand why it lost, but
it was really neat and I never spent any time with it and that was
unfortunate. There are other languages like that, where I’m aware of them,
I’ve read what I can about them, but I never got a chance to actually think in
them.
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Douglas Crockford
94
Seibel: So you actually ended up doing your degree in broadcasting; after
that what did you do?
Crockford: I started a master’s program in educational technology. But I
felt like I was so far ahead of where the program was that I was just wasting
time. I left that after about a year and went to work at SRI in Menlo Park, as
a researcher. Then I went to a company called Basic Four, which was
making small business minicomputers and spent a lot of years there. I
developed a word-processing system for them and started doing some
research into portable machines and PCs. I tried to push that company into
PCs; I bought the first PC in the company and left it open on my desk so
that the engineers could come look at it and see what IBM had done, but
ultimately I couldn’t change the culture there—they were pretty set in what
they were doing.
Then one Christmas, maybe it was Christmas of ’81, I bought an Atari 800. I
went to the computer store and there was an Apple II and an 800 and the
800 looked to be snazzier so I got that one. I thought that I’d write a word
processor on it or a programming language for it. But the 6502 was just not
up to doing anything. So I’d spent two thousand dollars for the thing—what
can it do? Well, obviously it can do games. So I started writing computer
games and I sold one to Atari and then got an offer to work in their
research laboratory in Sunnyvale. That was the research lab that Alan Kay
had started, his first thing since PARC. So I went there and it was great. I
was there for two years and watched the company melt down. But I
managed to do some interesting work there. Worked with some really
good people.
Seibel: Had you ever been a game aficionado before that?
Crockford: I’d thrown some quarters at Space Invaders and Pac-Man. I
liked the games; I wasn’t hard-core. The interesting thing about games for
me was it was another place where television interacted with computers. It
was the first place where the public got to participate in that interaction. I
thought that was really interesting.
Seibel: After Atari melted down, what next?
Crockford: Then I went to Lucasfilm and was there for eight years.
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