alt Hacker NewsI once saw a talk from Brian Kernighan who made a joke about how in three weeks Ken Thompson wrote a text editor, the B compiler, and the skeleton for managing input/output files, which turned out to be UNIX. The joke was that nowadays we're a bit less efficient :-D
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The interview is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6q5dv_B-o
One hour long, and Thompson tells a lot of entertaining stories. Kernighan does a good job of just letting Thompson speak.
A newer joke is that Ken Thompson (along with Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer) designed Go while waiting for C / C++ to compile.
I’m wondering what the process was for the early UNIX developers to attain this level of productivity.
Did they treat this as a 9-5 effort, or did they go into a “goblin mode” just to get it done while neglecting other aspects of their lives?
It is also the case that the first 80% of a projects functionality goes really quickly. Especially when you are interested and highly motivated about the project. That remaining 20% though. That is a long tail, it tends to be a huge slog that kills your motivation.
Otoh: I got react to run my tests without any warnings today.
I’ve heard that Torvalds build Git in 5 (or 10) days and that Brendan Eich created JavaScript in 10 days.
Maybe the average programmer is less efficient, but the distribution is probably heavily skewed these days.
Ken is definitely a top-notch programmer. A top-notch programmer can do a LOT given 3 weeks of focus time. I remember his wife took the kids to England so he was free to do whatever he wanted. And he definitely had a lot of experience before writing what was first version UNIX.
Every programmer that has a project in mind should try this: Put away 3 weeks of focus time in a cabin, away from work and family, gather every book or document you need and cut off the Internet. Use a dumb phone if you can live with it. See how far you can go. Just make sure it is something that you already put a lot of thoughts and a bit of code into it.
After thinking more thoroughly about the idea, I believe low level projects that rely on as few external libraries as possible are the best ones to try the idea out. If your project relies on piles of 3rd party libraries, you are stuck if you have an issue but without the Internet to help you figure it out. Ken picked the right project too.