Apple History At folklore.org

oaklybonn writes "Andy Hertzfeld seems to be the primary author on this fascinating site, which details many of his experiences in the Macintosh (Bicycle??) development efforts. It includes such choice commentary as: "we were amazed that such a thoroughly bad game could be co-authored by Microsoft's co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit for it in the comments.", on a page describing a game bundled with the original IBM PC." Reader themexican adds "As a plus, Hertzfeld notes in the faq that the python code running the well-designed and easy to navigate site will be made public in the near future."

Comments

let the games begin

[humankind]

It's really interesting to watch the Mac viral marketers come out of the woodwork for stories like this.

Re:Yeah, it holds up so well under load

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't anybody code in C any more?

Oh, for fuck's sake. Yes, people code in C, when they're writing applications. Seriously, when was the last time you saw a web interface written in C? There are some C-based CGIs out there, but very few in widespread use. That's because they take longer to develop, each fresh C-built interface introduces potential new vulnerabilities, etc. It's easier and less time consuming to rely on someone else's C coding (the interpreter for a scripting language) than to write the C yourself.

Web development, for whatever PHB reason, is supposed to be "fast." When writing a content management system for the web, especially if you need to interface with an SQL backend, C is not the fast track to completion. The C code may execute faster, but alas, on the web no one cares. PHP, Perl, and even Python will get your development done long before writing it in C, and without nearly as many potential vulnerabilities. If you can write good PHP/Perl/Python code, the only time you worry about security is when the interpreter is found to be vulnerable, and then it's only a few minutes to upgrade.

To put it bluntly: it's far easier to write shitty C code than it is to write shitty PHP/Perl/Python code, where "shitty" includes potentially crippling vulnerabilities. When it comes to web development, you leave the low-level malloc()s and memcpy()s up to the interpreter developers, and you put your own man-hours into higher-level scripting.