Andy Hertzfeld’s “Revolution in the Valley”
I haven’t read it yet, but the Wired News interview makes it sound pretty interesting. It’s apparently an expansion of Andy’s folklore.org site, which I have enjoyed immensely.
I originally encountered Andy’s code before the Mac even shipped; I was an Apple II owner, and learning 6502 assembly via the Call-A.P.P.L.E. user group magazine. One of the code examples was a neat routine Andy had written to print text in a particularly elegant way: you put a subroutine call to his routine, then immediately afterwards included the text string you wanted it to print. It popped the return address off the stack, incremented its way through the string, then pushed the address after the string back on before returning. This effectively hopped the flow of control over the string transparently!
The best quote from the interview:
WN: How does writing compare to coding?
Hertzfeld: I would say the key difference is the rigor. Writing you can get away with being sloppy and your book doesn’t crash.
