Seibeclass="underline" Do you feel like you taught yourself computer science or did you just learn to program?
Zawinski: Well, I certainly picked up a bunch of computer science over the years. But learning to program was the goal. Making the machine do something was the goal and the computer-science side of it was a means to an end.
Seibeclass="underline" Did you ever feel that as a lack—did you ever wish you had been exposed to things in a more systematic way?
Zawinski: There were definitely times, especially at Lucid, where it’d be obvious that there’s this whole big black hole that these guys are talking about that I just completely missed because I never needed to know it. And then I’d pick up the terminology and have a basic idea what they’re talking about and maybe do a little bit of reading on it if it was something I needed to know. So there were definitely times, especially early on, where I felt like, “Oh my god, I don’t know anything.” It would just be embarrassing—but that was just being insecure. Being the young kid around all these people with PhDs—“Aaah, I don’t know anything! I’m an idiot! How did I bluff my way into this?”
Though my life certainly would have turned out very differently if I had spent a lot more time in school—it was a moment in time when I got to do the things I did.
Seibeclass="underline" Did you ever feel the opposite, where you felt like the computer scientists around you just didn’t understand actual programming as well as you did?
Zawinski: I felt like that a lot, but really that’s not so much about thinking, “Wow, you guys have been barking up the wrong tree.” as, “Wow, we’re just not interested in the same things.” I don’t want to be a mathematician but I’m not going to criticize someone who is a mathematician.
It’s weird that people often confuse those two pursuits. People who are into very theoretical computer science are thought of in this same way as people who are shipping desktop applications. And they don’t really have a lot to do with each other.
Seibeclass="underline" You’re largely self-taught. Do you have any advice for selftaught programmers?
Zawinski: That’s a really hard question because the world’s so different now. I always feel weird talking about, “Here’s what I did.” I don’t know if that was the right way to do it. But people always hear it as, “Be like me.”
I stumbled into this—it all just sort of happened. I made some decisions and they led to others and here we are.
Every now and then I get an email from someone that’s basically, “I want to be a programmer; what do I do?” Or, “Should I go to college or not?” How can I answer that? I would have had very strong opinions about this if you asked me in 1986. But someone today couldn’t take the same path that I took because that path doesn’t even exist anymore.
Ten years ago I would have said absolutely the first thing you have to do is learn assembly language. You have to learn how the machine actually works. Does that matter any more? I don’t even know. Maybe it does. But possibly not. If the way software is going to be ten years from now is all web applications or a piece of distributed code in some rented computing cluster that’s moving around between a dozen different Google servers and spawning other copies of itself and then merging back together once it’s got results, does anyone need to know assembly language any more? Is that so abstracted away that it doesn’t matter? I don’t know.
I was kind of freaked out when I realized that there are people graduating with CS degrees who’d never written C. They started in Java and they stayed there. That just seemed bizarre and wrong. But I don’t know. Maybe it’s not wrong. Maybe that’s the caveman thoughts: “Back in my day, we programmed with a nine-volt battery and a steady hand!”
Seibeclass="underline" What about books? Are there particular computer-science or programming books that everyone should read?
Zawinski: I actually haven’t read very many of those. The one I always recommend is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which a lot of people are afraid of because it’s Lispy, but I think does a really good job of teaching programming without teaching a language. I think a lot of introductory-level stuff focuses on syntax and I definitely saw that in the classes I had in high school and in the intro classes at Carnegie-Mellon during my brief time there.
This is not teaching people to program; this is teaching people where the semicolon goes. That seems like the kind of thing that’s going to scare people away from it more than anything, because that’s not the interesting part. Not even to someone who knows what they’re doing.
There was another book—what was it called?—about debugging, written by someone from Microsoft. It was about how to use asserts effectively. I remember thinking that was a really good book, not because I learned anything from it, but because it was the book you wish your idiot coworker had read.
Then there was another book that everybody thought was the greatest thing ever in that same period—Design Patterns—which I just thought was crap. It was just like, programming via cut and paste. Rather than thinking through your task you looked through the recipe book and found something that maybe, kinda, sorta felt like it, and then just aped it. That’s not programming; that’s a coloring book. But a lot of people seemed to love it. Then in meetings they’d be tossing around all this terminology they got out of that book. Like, the inverse, reverse, double-back-flip pattern—whatever. Oh, you mean a loop? OK.
Seibeclass="underline" Is there a key skill programmers must have?
Zawinski: Well, curiosity—taking things apart. Wanting to know what’s going on under the hood. I think that’s really the basis of it. Without that I don’t think you get very far. That’s your primary way of acquiring knowledge. Taking something apart and looking at it is how you learn to build your own. At least for me. I’ve read very few books about computers. My experience has been digging through source code or reference manuals. I’ve got a goal and, alright, to do this I need to know what this thing does and what this thing does. And I’ll just sort of random-walk through that until I find where I’m going.
Seibeclass="underline" Have you read Knuth’s, The Art of Computer Programming?
Zawinski: I haven’t. And that’s one of those things where, I really probably should have. But I never did.
Seibeclass="underline" It’s tough going—you need a lot of math to really grok it.
Zawinski: And I’m not a math person at all.
Seibeclass="underline" That’s interesting. Lots of programmers come out of mathematics and lots of computer-science theory is very mathematical. So you’re an existence proof that it’s not absolutely necessary. How much math or mathy kind of thinking is necessary to be a good programmer?
Zawinski: Well, it depends on where you draw the line as to what’s mathy and what’s not. Is being good at pattern matching mathy? Having an understanding of orders of magnitude and combinatorics is important at a gut level. But I’m sure I would completely flunk if I had to take a basic intro quiz on that kind of stuff. It’s been so long since I’ve had to do anything formal like that.
Really the only math classes I had were in high school. I had algebra. A little bit of calculus. I wasn’t terribly good at it. I got through it but it didn’t really come naturally to me. I had a physics class in high school where we were doing mechanics and doing labs dragging blocks across sandpaper and stuff like that. I did terribly in that class and felt like an idiot because I actually enjoyed the class. I did the labs really well—the procedure was spot on—and then I just couldn’t do the math.
I’d get an answer that I knew was three orders of magnitude off. I’d show my work—I don’t know what I did wrong. I’d get half credit since the data was collected properly and I cleaned up afterwards. So math was never really my forte.