An Interview with Andy Hertzfeld

https://www.notion.so/tools-and-craft/01-andy-hertzfeld

by state • 8 years ago

158 29 8 years ago

Andy is the principal author of the posts on 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.

filereaper• 8 years ago

man, folklore.org was an amazing find when I went through university.

I was fully convinced all those late nights at the lab meant I was doing something horribly wrong the whole time. Reading about all the trial and failure that the Mac team went though really set everything into perspective.

I really wish more groundbreaking projects cut through the mythology behind them, the sharp edges where the teams bled through aren't always shown. I really enjoy works where this stuff comes through, works like "The Soul of New Machine" and the like capture the hard parts...

pjmlp• 8 years ago

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

http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...

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

badsectoracula2• 8 years ago

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.

Animats2• 8 years ago

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

mlinksva• 8 years ago

According to 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+.

pinewurst• 8 years ago

I wonder if Google made him go through their regular interview process?

perl4ever2• 8 years ago

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.

elvinyung• 8 years ago

Sibling comment mentioned mentioned OSAF. Recently I read Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg, which is a chronicle of the fun technical debt (mis)adventures that the OSAF had with Chandler, with some appearances by Hertzfeld.

comatose_kid• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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

contingencies• 8 years ago

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 ;)

kevintb2• 8 years ago

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

fastball• 8 years ago

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.

kevintb2• 8 years ago

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

sulam• 8 years ago

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.

DonHopkins3• 8 years ago

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 ;).

coldtea3• 8 years ago

Telescript is still something that intuitively seems like a good idea for a certain class of problem.

It has been available in other forms -- e.g. Distributed Smalltalk ( https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/170223/ ).

DonHopkins3• 8 years ago

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...

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

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

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

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

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• 8 years ago

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.

gist• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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".

An Interview with Andy Hertzfeld

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