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Microsoft Insider: "15% of Windows Vista written in INTERCAL"
Over five years elapsed between the release of Windows XP and Windows Vista, the longest product-cycle in the history of Microsoft's flagship product. Today a former Microsoft employee, a very disgruntled former employee, revealed to Wired Magazine why the company encountered such a large number of problems delivering their latest operating-system release - Apple Computer was to blame. Clarg Creber, a member of Microsoft's Core Operating Systems Division (COSD) for eight years until 2005, spoke to Wired's Hugh MacLachlan for their upcoming April print edition.
HM: Thanks for speaking with me, Clarg.
CC: Thank-you, Hugh. It is my pleasure.
HM: You told me briefly on the phone how a practical joke by Apple led to massive confusion inside Microsoft starting in 2002.
CC: Yes. Microsoft had just delivered Windows XP late in 2001 and it was a great financial success. But upper management was worried about Mac OS X 10.1, 'Puma' as it was called, and the impact that it might have on future Windows sales. At the time, and even now, Apple was a very small player in the desktop computer market, but that didn't stop Microsoft from being paranoid. As we know empires never last forever; even Rome fell eventually.
At the time Bill Gates was 'chief software architect' and of course was still pulling the strings despite Steve Ballmer being CEO. Gates employed an 'industry research' firm, a company specializing in corporate espionage, to steal the source code of Apple's work-in-progress, OS X version 10.2. He planned to beat Apple to market with Apple's own new features. It was a very strange plan considering that Microsoft already owned over 90% of the desktop market.
HM: Yes, I guess Bill sometimes lives up to his quirky reputation sometimes.
CC: Indeed. Well, to cut a very long story short, after three months of posing as a systems programmer, Apple's security department discovered the Microsoft 'mole' and brought him to the attention of Apple management. Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO and long-time geek-prankster, arranged for the source-code of Apple's obsolete System 7 operating-system to be machine-translated to INTERCAL. A CD with the joke operating-system was marked with the text 'OS X 10.2 Build 9822' and left in the mole's trash can. Apparently he took the bait and delivered the disc to Gates.
HM: You've lost me. INTERCAL?
CC: Yes, INTERCAL. It is known as an 'esoteric' programming language. It is basically a practical joke, created in the early 70s. It is a language designed to be deliberately hard to decipher; an elaborate nerd in-joke.
For example, the stereo-typical beginner's first program in any given language is 'Hello, World' which simply prints out those two words. In a language like Python this would be written as:
print "Hello, World!"
:but in INTERCAL this would be written as:
DO ,1 <- #13
PLEASE DO ,1 SUB #1 <- #234
DO ,1 SUB #2 <- #112
DO ,1 SUB #3 <- #112
DO ,1 SUB #4 <- #0
DO ,1 SUB #5 <- #64
DO ,1 SUB #6 <- #194
DO ,1 SUB #7 <- #48
PLEASE DO ,1 SUB #8 <- #22
DO ,1 SUB #9 <- #248
DO ,1 SUB #10 <- #168
DO ,1 SUB #11 <- #24
DO ,1 SUB #12 <- #16
DO ,1 SUB #13 <- #214
PLEASE READ OUT ,1
PLEASE GIVE UP
INTERCAL makes even the simplest of programs unnecessarily difficult to create and understand. That was Steve Job's joke, but unfortunately Gates doesn't have a very strong sense of humour.
HM: How so?
CC: Well... he thought the code was real.
HM: Impossible!
CC: Unfortunately not. He distributed the joke code to the COSD team and asked them to start copying features to their newly started Windows 'Code-name Longhorn' project using the C-INTERCAL compiler. The developers thought that Gates was joking and giving them a deserved rest after the long hours of the Windows XP project.
HM: How long did it take them to realize that Gates was serious?
CC: A couple of weeks after the initial project kick-off meeting one of the developers smiled at Gates in a hallway and quipped, "Go, INTERCAL!" Gates stopped him and asked him to explain his remark. Unimpressed, Gates arrogantly fired the developer and told the rest of our team to show him some respect and "Get coding!"
HM: Clarg, you are making this up!
CC: I wish I was. Over the next two years our team copied over 600,000 lines of INTERCAL code from the Apple disk into the Windows Longhorn code-base. I'll admit that despite the ridiculous nature of the INTERCAL language many of us became quite proficient. It wasn't until we had missed several dead-lines that management finally realised what had happened.
HM: When was this?
CC: In early 2005, shortly before I left. Of course dozens of people had left the team in frustration before that point, but when the INTERCAL bomb finally exploded it was the worst day in my career. Gates and other senior management could not believe the extent of the mistake. Unfortunately we were past the point of no return so we simply continued. Many widely publicised features were dropped and it took nearly another six months of 100-hour work weeks before the existing work could be cleaned up for beta testing. Much of the INTERCAL code was re-written in C, but I would estimate that at least half of our INTERCAL work made it to the final release.
HM: Clarg, that is an incredible story but it sure does explain the massive Vista delay and the striking lack of new features that if offers compared to Windows XP. Thanks for telling your story.
PS. This is the second post in my series of attempted humour about Microsoft. I don't know what has come over me in the past week. A few days I was picking at monkey-boy Steve Ballmer, a completely unprovoked attack on the idol of Visual Basic programmers world-wide.
In the interests of balance I will try to think up something stupid to write about Steve Jobs soon. To be honest, I am not sure he is interesting enough to make fun of
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