Bill Joy Quotes

• You can’t prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN. It’s really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar.
• There are a couple of people in the world who can really program in C or FORTRAN. They write more code in less time than it takes for other programmers. Most programmers aren’t that good. The problem is that those few programmers who crank out code aren’t interested in maintaining it.
• The buzzwords of the 1980s are mips and megaflops. The buzzwords of the 1990s will be verification, reliability, and understandability.
• Xerox PARC was a great environment because they had great people, enough money to build real systems, and management that protected them from management.
• The best way to do research is to make a radical assumption and then assume it’s true. For me, I use the assumption that object oriented programming is the way to go.
• At Sun, we don’t believe in the Soviet model of economic planning.
• You can drive a car by looking in the rear view mirror as long as nothing is ahead of you. Not enough software professionals are engaged in forward thinking.
• The standard definition of AI is that which we don’t understand.
• Questioner [whose initials are EF]: You mentioned in your talk about a catastrophic event taking place ten years from now that will depress you. Looking back, doesn’t UNIX depress you? It’s now 1989 and UNIX is 1968. BJ: Standards for UNIX are coming. This will halt progress. That will provide the opportunity for something better to enter the marketplace. You see, as long as UNIX keeps slipping and makes some progress, nothing better will come along. The UNIX standards committees are therefore doing us a great service by slowing down and eventually halting the progress of UNIX.
• Generic software has absolutely no value.
• The GNU approach to software is one extreme. Of course, it violates my axiom of the top programmers demanding lots of money for their products.
• Our biggest worry at Sun is going to be managing our eventual slowdown in growth. We’ve gone from zero to a multi-billion dollar company without even one quarter of slowdown. That cannot continue forever. So, if we manage our slowdown without bankrupting our company, it will be a good book. If we don’t do it, it will be a good book.