Bill Joy
Bill Joy
William Nelson "Bill" Joyis an American computer scientist. Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Andreas von Bechtolsheim, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003. He played an integral role in the early development of BSD UNIX while a graduate student at Berkeley, and he is the original author of the vi text editor. He also wrote the 2000 essay "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us", in which he expressed deep...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth8 November 1954
CountryUnited States of America
Bill Joy quotes about
The best way to do research is to make a radical assumption and then assume it's true. For me, I use the assumption that object oriented programming is the way to go.
Although humankind inherently "desires to know", if open access to, and unlimited development of, knowledge henceforth puts us all in clear danger of extinction, then common sense demands that we re-examine our reverence for knowledge.
The next step after cheap is free, and after free is disposable.
The reason I use ed is that I don't want to lose what's on the screen.
That lack of programmability is probably what ultimately will doom vi. It can't extend its domain.
The Open Source theorem says that if you give away source code, innovation will occur. Certainly, Unix was done this way... However, the corollary states that the innovation will occur elsewhere. No matter how many people you hire. So the only way to get close to the state of the art is to give the people who are going to be doing the innovative things the means to do it. That's why we had built-in source code with Unix. Open source is tapping the energy that's out there.
There are a couple of people in the world who can really program in C or FØRTRAN. They write more code in less time than it takes for other programmers. Most programmers aren't that good. The problem is that those few programmers who crank out code aren't interested in maintaining it.
It is formatted, and I'm tired of using vi. I get really bored.
Document preparation systems will also require large screen displays.
Take responsibility for the things you build and invent.
And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species - to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself.
I think multiple levels of undo would be wonderful, too.
You can't solve a problem with the management of technology with more technology.
I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated.