skaphan

Yes, there was a ton of Perl in the early days. This came about because Paul Davis was a Perl aficionado and did a lot of script writing with it early on, and the non-programmers, of which there were n-2, could pick it up much more easily than C (of course). Which is how some of them became programmers. Incidentally, we used C, not C++, though I liked OOP, because I had previously had less than great experience using C++ on large projects. We used a C++ compiler though because it could catch more errors than the C compiler could. This is one area where Steve Yegge was a bit off in that famous post.

After leaving Lucid I was really not paying much attention to what they were doing. It wasn't long before things started going badly there and they were out of business a few years later. But indeed, I had forgotten what little of the Emacs history I might have known. Here it is: https://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html

If you are referring to Jamie Zawinski (jwz), yes, but after my time there.

EB and I both worked at Lucid, which produced a Common Lisp system, not to my knowledge a version of Emacs (though maybe so after I left in 1989?). Some other early employees knew and liked Lisp, but we didn't use it on any core functionality. The text substitution logic you mention, that I wrote, was really simple and not particularly Lisp-like. Though again, after I handed it off, who knows what happened.

It was used only in the form of Emacs Lisp, as a set of tools for customer service folks to make replying to typical email easier for them. They pretty much built all that themselves (and they didn't start out as programmers).

But ... in the one case we are aware of, of a whole company, Amazon, using a service oriented architecture, they did it after the fact. The did bolt it on later, or rather, they (according to Steve) ripped everything up and re-did it in this way. I'm sure it was absolute hell to do this, but that is what they apparently did. So it isn't a requirement to build a platform first, then build everything else. It might be nicer to do it that way, if it's the best prioritization of resources at the time, but that's not what happened in the case being discussed.

It's definitely a little odd. In one way it is just a matter of semantics: what exactly does the word "founder" really denote? But some may be asking whether I personally was all that important in the company's history. I can't judge that. All I know for sure is that I put my heart and soul into it especially during the first half of my time there, and I still feel a strong connection to the place (despite having left almost 12 years ago) even when they really get me angry, like with this sales tax thing. I'd prefer not to have to have a personal reaction to things like that, but there you are. As is pointed out elsewhere, Bezos was the only one who was really making strategic decisions, and it's probably still that way for all I know, though I participated in some. The idea to do a bookstore was his, though we were not the first on the web to do that. That doesn't mean I (and other early "participants") didn't have our own visions of where things ought to go too. When you do the engineering, hacking, and tech operations side of a startup, going from nothing to something, it's like it grows out of you and it feels like an extension of you. That's a different relationship from being the person with the idea who does the fund-raising and makes the big decisions. You need to have both.

At one point I'd say the company's "DNA" probably was influenced by me to an extent, but I've been gone for a long time, and it was tiny compared to its current size when I left, so it would be pretty surprising if any of that is still there. That's fine with me -- that's just how things work.

Hi. Shel Kaphan here. Just to be clear, the negotiation you are referring to was simply over whether it would be stock or employee options. No reason to be sad. Founder's stock is more convenient and less of a taxation nightmare, but there was a concern (an irrational one, I think) about what would happen if I left early. There are of course ways, such as escrow, to handle that.

As for whether or not I'm a nice amiable guy, Chris (below) is probably right -- a lot of people including him got to experience the joys of my temper while I was trying to do what isn't possible: to contain the chaos ;^\

At the risk of mentioning something I did myself, here is a simple, STM implementation in C: http://github.com/skaphan/stmmap . It's at a very different design point from others like Clojure's in that it is just a simple API, not a language mechanism, it is for concurrency at the process level, not threads, adds no extra "goo" between the program and its data, but has a fairly coarse grain size for conflict detection (page size). Who knows, it might be appropriate for some situations...