The issue of taste really fits in there. You can have a piece of text describing something that describes it correctly or it can describe it well, with some flair. And the same thing’s true of programs. It can get the job done or it can also make sense, be put together well.

Seibel: And why does that matter? Is that just for the satisfaction of it or is tasteful code also better in some practical way?

Zawinski: To a large degree, tasteful and maintainable are similar. Or very closely related. One of the things that makes a piece of writing tasteful is if it’s structured in a way that’s easy to grasp. Are the facts loaded up at the front or are they scattered around? If you’re referring back—if you’re flipping through a book, can you figure out where in the book is the thing you kind of remember? “This was somewhere near the middle because that’s where he talked about this thing.” Or is it just scattered all through. And that’s the same sort of thing that goes on with programming a lot.

Seibel: Do you think the kind of people who can be successful at programming has changed?

Zawinski: Certainly these days it’s impossible to just write a program from scratch that doesn’t have any dependencies. The explosion of toolkits and libraries and frameworks and that sort of thing—even the most basic piece of software needs those these days. It’s just exploded. These days, everything’s got to be a web app. And that’s just a whole different way of going about it.

So, if anything, that makes the part of the skill set that is being able to dive into someone else’s code and figure out how to make use of it even more important. “I don’t understand this, so I’m going to write my own” worked better in the past. Whether it was ever a good idea or not, you could do it. It’s much harder to get away with that now.

Seibel: I wonder if the inclination to take things apart and understand everything also needs to be a little more tempered these days. If you try to take apart every piece of code you work with, it’ll never end—these days you’ve got to have a little capacity for saying, “I sort of understand how this works and I’m going to let it go at that until it becomes urgent that I understand it better.”

Zawinski: Yeah. My first instinct, because things work that way, is you’re breeding a generation of programmers who don’t understand anything about efficiency or what’s actually being allocated. When they realize, “Oh, my program’s getting gigantic,” what are they going to do? They’re not going to know where to start. That’s my first instinct because I’m a caveman. Really that probably doesn’t even matter because you’ll just throw more memory at it and it’ll be fine.

Seibel: Or perhaps people will actually learn a more sophisticated view of what all those things mean. Like, maybe it doesn’t really matter whether we allocated six bytes or four bytes here—what matters is whether we’ve sized this thing so it fits in one node of the cluster versus having to spill over onto a second node.

Zawinski: Right, exactly. I think programming has definitely changed in that sense. The things you had to focus on before were different. Before you would focus on counting bytes, and “How big are my objects? Maybe I should do something different here because that array header is really going to add up.” Things like that. No one is ever going to care about that stuff again. Tricks like XORing your forward and back pointers into the same word are voodoo—why would anyone do that; it’s crazy. But there’s this whole different set of skills now that were always around but come more to the front. People who can dig into an API and figure out which parts you need and which parts you don’t, is, I think, one of those important things now.

Seibel: If you were 13 today, would you be drawn to programming the way programming is today?

Zawinski: So hard to say. I don’t know any 13-year-olds. I don’t know what the world looks like. Things are harder to take apart now. There’s not going to be some 10-year-old who pops open his cell phone and figures out how the speaker works like I did with a phone when I was a little kid. There are no user-serviceable parts anymore.

I feel like that kind of tinkering, taking the back of the tape deck off and seeing how the gears fit together, that sort of exploration is what led to this for me. Aside from things like LEGO Mindstorms, I don’t think there’s a lot of opportunity for people to follow that path these days. But maybe I’m wrong—like I said, I don’t know any 13-year-olds. I don’t know what the toys are like. There’s a lot of video games; there’s a lot of things with remote controls. I haven’t seen any really good construction kinds of toys. Which seems sad.

Seibel: On the flip side, programming itself is much more accessible. You don’t have to master all the intricacies of assembly programming right off the bat just to make a computer do something neat.

Zawinski: Yeah. I imagine that today’s kids who are getting into programming start off building some web app or writing a Facebook plugin or something. Brad Fitzpatrick, who wrote LiveJournal, is a friend of mine. When he wrote LiveJournal he was goofing around and wrote this Perl script where he and his friends could say, “I’m going to get lunch.” The way he started out was he wrote a little Perl script and put it on a web server. Probably things will go more in that direction.

Brad Fitzpatrick

Brad Fitzpatrick is the youngest person I interviewed and the only one who has never lived in a world without the Internet or personal computers. Born in 1980, he got an early start as a programmer, learning to program at age five on a homebuilt Apple II clone. By his teenage years the Internet revolution was in full swing and he was deep into it, building his first commercial web site while still in high school and starting work on the popular community site LiveJournal the summer before he went to college.

Keeping up with LiveJournal’s ever-growing popularity forced Fitzpatrick to learn the hard way about building scalable web sites and along the way he and the programmers at the company he founded, Danga Interactive, ended up building several pieces of open source software, including memcached, Perlbal, and MogileFS, which are now used on the servers of many of the world’s busiest web sites.

Fitzpatrick is a prototypical—if exceptionally accomplished—turn-of-the-century web programmer: his primary programming languages have been Perl and C, though he also works in Java, C++, Python, JavaScript, and C# as needed. And almost all the programming he does is somehow network-related, whether it’s building better back-end infrastructure for web sites, designing protocols and software to improve the way blog-reading software knows when blogs have been updated, or programming his cell phone to automatically open his garage door when he rides up on his motorcycle.

We talked about learning to program at the same age as he was reading Clifford the Big Red Dog, why he was glad he stayed in college while running LiveJournal, and how he learned not to be afraid of reading other people’s code.

Seibel: How did you become a programmer?

Fitzpatrick: My dad was working at Mostek. They made memory and he was into computers. He built an Apple II from spare parts, pretty much. He and my mom would sit around the TV soldering it all together. It took them months, just soldering it. Then he was able to get ROMs from work that they weren’t going to sell because they had a bit, or multiple bits, stuck high or stuck low. Somehow they got the Apple II ROM and they just kept burning it onto these dead chips until they got one that worked, where the stuck bits just happened to be right. Eventually he and a bunch of his coworkers managed to make homemade Apple IIs. I was playing on that from age two or so and watching him program.