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
I started to write a new editor not too long ago and had it about half done after two days.
I think editors have to come out of a certain kind of community.
I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated.
I think one of the interesting things is that vi is really a mode-based editor.
What's your personal computer, anyway? Your personal computer should be something that's always on your person.
So Chuck and I looked at that and we hacked on em for a while, and eventually we ripped the stuff out of em and put some of it into what was then called en, which was really ed with some em features.
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.
Not all smart people work at Sun Microsystems.
The point is that you want to have a system that is responsive.