Jamie Zawinski

Note: this post has a follow up here (link).

I am just done reading the first interview of “Coders at Work” (link), the one with Jamie Zawinski (link). And he says quite a few things that resonate with me.

Not knowing something doesn’t mean you’re dumb - it just means you don’t know it yet.

A good principle to always keep in mind and to apply both to oneself and to others.

“Aaah, I don’t know anything! I’m an idiot! How did I bluff my way into this?”

I’m like this all the time.

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.

I don’t like that book either, but I have more problems with the people who liked the book than with the book itself. Hopefully I haven’t seen much around lately.

Finally, here is another one, taken from Jamie’s response (link) to Joel Spolsky’s “The Duct Tape Programmer” (link) and the comments surrounding it:

People always want to get in fights over the specifics like “what’s wrong with templates?” without realizing the historical context. Guess what, you young punks, templates didn’t work in 1994.

I should start my sentences with “guess what, you young punks” more often, that totally drives the point across.