More HN catching with top stories from Reddit. The proggit discussion has many insights.<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/82s16/has_joel_spolsky_been_honest_about_his_time_at/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/82s16/has_joel_...</a><p><pre><code> The context is important. First, it is in reply to this, which quotes Spolsky as:
"This seemed to piss off a guy named Greg Whitten who headed up the App Architecture
group. Now, Greg was something like Microsoft employee number 6. He had been around
forever; nobody could quite point to anything he had done but apparently he had
lunch with Bill Gates a lot and GW-BASIC was named after him."
Second, the post to the mailing list itself is a forward of a private e-mail
from Greg Whitten. I can't see if he said anywhere he was okay with making
it public.
</code></pre>
More HN catching with proggit top stories.
I hope that John Foust had Dr. Whitten's permission to publish this apparently <i>private</i> mail. To the people who say that Whitten is arrogant or bitter, please read Joel's disrespectful comments first:<p><a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles</a><p>"This seemed to piss off a guy named Greg Whitten who headed up the App Architecture group. Now, Greg was something like Microsoft employee number 6. He had been around forever; nobody could quite point to anything he had done but apparently he had lunch with Bill Gates a lot and GW-BASIC was named after him."
The part about Spolsky, if true, is interesting because Joel obviously doesn't see some of the decisions he made at Microsoft as wrong since he's still doing the same thing.<p>"He made other similarly stupid decisions like creating a custom programming interface for BASIC in Excel instead of sharing a common interface as strongly recommended. "<p>Did anyone else think of his special Fog Creek internal programming language?<p>I particularly like this article that says you should only write new production code in a language lots of people know and others have lots of experience in and then ends with we don't though.
<a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html</a>
Why is everybody gossiping -- both here and on proggit -- about a discussion list thread from April 2005?<p>(Yes, it's a rhetorical question, but if there's a reason why this has suddenly become timely I'd actually like to know.)
Yeah yeah, well Joel is not fan of those "Chief Software Architects" at Microsoft either. If you listen to the #44 stackoverflow podcast, he really disses those "architect" types.<p><a href="http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/podcast-44/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/podcast-44/</a>
This just goes to show how important is to be nice ALLLL the time on the internet.<p>The one time JS is a douche, he gets called on it big time, and there's nothing he can say to make himself seem like less of a douche.<p>I am sure JS and GW are both perfectly fine people if you sit down with them for a cup of coffee, and if they randomly sat next to each other on a plane they'd probably get along fine too.<p>Stuff you write stays on the internet forever.