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
Given the incredible power of these new technologies, shouldn't we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn't we proceed with great caution?
Systems are going to get a lot more sophisticated.
There are always more smart people outside your company than within it.
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.
We have to encourage the future we want rather than trying to prevent the future we fear.
Interleaf is based on the formatting process.
Sometimes the easiest way to get something done is to be a little naive about it.
Most of the bright people don't work for you - no matter who you are.
But with Interleaf I don't even have a spell program.
The fundamental problem with vi is that it doesn't have a mouse and therefore you've got all these commands.
I think it killed the performance on a lot of the systems in the Labs for years because everyone had their own copy of it, but it wasn't being shared, and so they wasted huge amounts of memory back when memory was expensive.
I think the wonderful thing about vi is that it has such a good market share because we gave it away.
I think the hard thing about all these tools is that it takes a fair amount of effort to become proficient.
I remember right after Carter got elected, I was sitting in my apartment in Albany, CA, on a Saturday listening to people call Carter and ask stupid questions while I designed the screen editor.