[HN Gopher] My Journey into Personal Computer Software Developme...
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My Journey into Personal Computer Software Development in 1983
Author : saloama
Score : 45 points
Date : 2024-04-20 18:29 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (farrs.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (farrs.substack.com)
| orangesite wrote:
| There's an inverse relationship between how good folk think they
| are vs. how good they actually are.
|
| Anyone who's spent time in musician communities will be
| intimately familiar with the phenomenon.
|
| Anyone who's spent time in musician communities will also
| understand just how good you need to be if you're still doing it
| after two decades.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Isn't that pretty much the definition of the Dunning-Kruger
| effect?
|
| I was actually a pretty decent bassist, way back, when mullets
| were _en vogue_ , but I also knew that I wasn't good enough to
| stand out from the crowd.
| SaberTail wrote:
| It's a common misunderstanding of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
|
| In actuality, there's a direct relationship between how good
| a person thinks they are and how good they actually are. Not
| inverse. The Dunning-Kruger effect is that the people at the
| low end of the scale tend to rate themselves as slightly
| better than they are, and people at the high end of the scale
| tend to rate themselves as slightly worse than they are. The
| best people know they're good, but they tend to think they're
| not the best. The worst people know they're bad, but they
| tend to think they're not the worst.
| YZF wrote:
| Good musicians know they're good though. I'm not sure the
| comparison holds that well for software people. With music you
| have a lot more immediate feedback. You can record yourself and
| play back. You can see how long it takes you to learn something
| technically complex (if you even can learn something very
| technical). With software sometimes the outcome of decisions
| can only be seen years later and there's really very little in
| terms of absolute metrics you can rely on for feedback. Music
| is a hobby for me but in my circle I haven't seen people that
| thought they were amazing musicians but really are terrible.
| abraae wrote:
| Say what you will about MS (and I said a lot when I worked at
| Lotus on the mainframe port of Lotus 1-2-3) but they knew what
| was important for success.
|
| A spreadsheet on it's own is a thing of technical beauty but for
| market domination you don't want to keep pouring resources into
| that one product, you want a suite of complimentary products.
|
| You want to be able to embed your spreadsheet into a document,
| into a slide presentation. You want cutting and pasting to work
| sensibly between products. You want consistency in the menus and
| layouts.
|
| Bill Gates understood all of this from the beginning, the same as
| he understood that the strength of a PC operating system is not
| how reliable, memory safe and performant it is, it's in how
| flashy it looks and how important the windows paradigm is.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Yes, however this story is from before that, the early DOS era.
| No standards for UI or drivers etc.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| > You want to be able to embed your spreadsheet into a
| document, into a slide presentation.
|
| I mean, MS made ActiveX and it was a security risk:
|
| https://www.wired.com/1996/11/will-activex-threaten-national...
| mtmail wrote:
| If I recall being able to embed an Excel spreadsheet into a
| Word document was OLE
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Great story. Surprised that he had experience with C, but wanted
| to rewrite their product in assembly instead. The timeline given
| was understandably not very precise, but C and even Pascal
| compilers should have been starting to be available around this
| time.
| Animats wrote:
| Available, yes. Good, no. Nobody had enough memory space on PC-
| class machines to do a good compiler.
|
| (AutoCAD for the original MacOS was compiled on Sun machines,
| because the Apple compilers were so bad.)
| cmpalmer52 wrote:
| My first professional software development job was circa 1982-83.
| I was in high school, working part time for my step-brother. He'd
| just got a luggable PC like the one in the picture and he paid me
| like $20 to write a MS-BASIC program to calculate payroll
| withholdings.
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