brainstorms

Friday April 01, 2005

all the best hackers i know...

All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs.

so opens another charming paul graham essay titled Return of the Mac.

[no this is not an april fool's joke]

even though some of graham's essays are as irritating to my critical faculties as wearing a wool sweater in a humid august afternoon, i will take it easy on this one; i have been using macs since 1984; these days all my photography goes through a dual-cpu g4 and i carry a g4 ibook with me everywhere. also, i too know some good hackers who made the switch.

on the other hand...

old mac as a canonical hacker's computer? that is romantic fiction, especially when all you had to work with was a tinkertoy operating system (for some loose definition of that term). i did spend a lot of (wasted) time and energy hacking on macs; (even wrote a lisp interpreter for macs, macclisp - pun intended) for an excitable unix+vms hacker, macs were painful to program. just take a look at that fun event loop! veni, vidi, vomui. early choices: relatively clunky c compilers (aztec, think) with imitation shells, pascal or basic. no really worthwhile lisp (until lightship scheme) that i could recall. there may have been a useful smalltalk. if only those sofas at cambridge could talk...

another thing: what are those hardcore OS hackers doing with their new macs? i would really enjoy seeing some groundbreaking new stuff coming out of OS X we can use on sol10, [free|net|open]bsd and linux. [so far everything seems to be going the other direction, including the hackers...]

[on the right is my cover graphic for computing news, york university, 1984]

[addendum: graham likes to talk about taste and design; it would have been worthwhile to see him analyse mac designs in depth. here, one way is to be dazzled by their industrial and usability designs and come up with the usual platitudes; another way is to analyse the os, various api and protocol designs (eg. appletalk gets the prize for cutest solution - perlman, interconnections, second ed.) and algorithms (eg. apple numerics) as well. why, we call this computer science.]