Alexander Gromnitsky's Blog

Real men make programs that set up their own windows

Latest update:

Doug McIlroy's recollections about Macintosh (not Apple II):

Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 00:42:42 -0400
From: Doug McIlroy <doug-bJGkzYaaMJvEkZP4S/TgZg@public.gmane.org>
Newsgroups: gmane.org.unix-heritage.general
Subject: Re: What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?
User-Agent: Heirloom mailx 12.5 7/5/10
Message-ID: <201910120442.x9C4ggMF021949@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU>

For a contrast in aha moments, consider this introduction to
an early Apple (Apple II, I think).

When my wife got one, my natural curiosity led me to try to
make "Hello world".

I asked her what to use as an editor and learned it all depends
on what you're editing.

So I looked in the manual. First thing you do to make a C program
is to set up a "project", as if it was a corporate undertaking.

I found it easier to write a program in some other editor than
the one for C. Bad idea. Every file had a type and that editor
produced files of some type other than C program.

After succumbing to the Apple straitjacket, I succeeded.

Then I found "Hello world" given as an example in the manual.
The code took up almost a page; real men make programs that
set up their own windows.

Aha, Apple! Not intended for programmers.
And that didn't change until OS X.

Tags: quote, ойті
Authors: ag