On Mon, 21 Mar 2005, Lindy Mayfield wrote:

>> Moreover, Bill Gates is the best programmer in the world. Did you know he
>> has the highest IQ of all people ever born, since IQs have been measured?
>
> Didn't he like write a basic interpreter for some machine while on the 
> airplane while he was flying to the demonstration, and then when he 
> got there they typed it in and it ran perfectly the first time?  And 
> they didn't have assemblers back then; everything was written in 1's 
> and 0's.

While the details about where exactly he wrote may vary (one cannot say 
that it was snowing and that he walked uphill both ways while flying in 
an airplane, so no-one is saying that), I think that the part about his 
writing some of it on the way may be true. And I don't buy the part 
about 'it ran perfectly the first time' if it had more than 300 lines of 
code, no matter who wrote it, where, or when, or with what, unless he 
used a highlighting ide with inline popup context help and other tools. 
And there was no such thing at the time afaik. I'm also pretty sure that 
basic interpreters are much longer than 300 lines, even if written in C. 
The record is held by that obfuscated C contest winning code and it has 
more than 300 lines when expanded (more exactly: when all its parts are 
expanded - I spent half a day once disassembling(!) that C (!) code). 
That code implements a basic interpreter and it was not written by B.

The push-it-out-of-the-door-at-the-last-minute technology appears to be 
a feature of theirs. In his book, 'The Road Ahead' (1995) he wrote that 
he used to do that in college. The other person who he said was also 
doing that was Steve Ballmer. You have to admit that it is a brilliant 
idea. You get so many *paying* beta testers that way! Otoh, this 
'technology' is not so rare in the business world where sometimes 
prototypes built with duct tape and chewing gum holding the parts inside 
are sold to desperate clients as is. And I do not like that at all.

Peter
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