He worked at UC Berkeley for Peter Norvig, who has described him as “one of the of the best programmers I ever hired,” and later at Lucid, the Lisp company, where he ended up leading the development of Lucid Emacs, later renamed XEmacs, which eventually led to the great Emacs schism, one of the most famous open source forks.
In 1994 he finally left Lucid and the Lisp world to join Netscape, then a fledgling start-up, where he was one of the original developers of the Unix version of the Netscape browser and later of the Netscape mail reader.
In 1998 Zawinski was one of the prime movers, along with Brendan Eich, behind mozilla.org, the organization that took the Netscape browser open source. A year later, discouraged by the lack of progress toward a release, he quit the project and bought a San Francisco nightclub, the DNA Lounge, which he now runs. He is currently devoting his energies to battling the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control in an attempt to convert the club to an all-ages venue for live music.
In this interview we talked about, among other things, why C++ is an abomination, the joy of having millions of people use your software, and the importance of tinkering for budding programmers.
Seibeclass="underline" How did you learn to program?
Zawinski: Wow, it was so long ago I can barely remember it. The first time I really used a computer in a programming context was probably like eighth grade, I think. We had some TRS-80s and we got to goof around with BASIC a little bit. I’m not sure there was even a class—I think it was just like an after-school thing. I remember there was no way to save programs so you’d just type them in from magazines and stuff like that. Then I guess I read a bunch of books. I remember reading books about languages that I had no way to run and writing programs on paper for languages that I’d only read about.
Seibeclass="underline" What languages would that have been?
Zawinski: APL, I remember, was one of them. I read an article about it and thought it was really neat.
Seibeclass="underline" Well, it saves having to have the fancy keyboard. When you were in high school did you have any classes on computers?
Zawinski: In high school I learned Fortran. That’s about it.
Seibeclass="underline" And somehow you got exposed to Lisp.
Zawinski: I read a lot of science fiction. I thought AI was really neat; the computers are going to take over the world. So I learned a little bit about that. I had a friend in high school, Dan Zigmond, and we were trading books, so we both learned Lisp. One day he went to the Apple Users Group meeting at Carnegie Mellon—which was really just a software-trading situation—because he wanted to get free stuff. And he’s talking to some college student there who’s like, “Oh, here’s this 15-year-old who knows Lisp; that’s novel; you should go ask Scott Fahlman for a job.” So Dan did. And Fahlman gave him one. And then Dan said, “Oh, you should hire my friend too,” and that was me. So Fahlman hired us. I think his motivation had to be something along the lines of, Wow, here are two high school kids who are actually interested in this stuff; it doesn’t really do me much harm to let them hang out in the lab.” So we had basic grunt work—this set of stuff needs to be recompiled because there’s a new version of the compiler; go figure out how to do that. Which was pretty awesome. So there are the two of us—these two little kids—surrounded by all these grad students doing language and AI research.
Seibeclass="underline" Was that the first chance you actually had to run Lisp, there at CMU.
Zawinski: I think so. I know at one point we were goofing around with XLISP, which ran on Macintoshes. But I think that was later. I learned how to program for real there using these PERQ workstations which were part of the Spice project, using Spice Lisp which became CMU Common Lisp. It was such an odd environment. We’d go to weekly meetings, learning how software development works just by listening in. But there were some really entertaining characters in that group. Like the guy who was sort of our manager—the one keeping an eye on us—Rob MacLachlan, was this giant blond-haired, barbarianlooking guy. Very intimidating-looking. And he didn’t talk much. I remember a lot of times I’d be sitting there—it was kind of an openplan cubicle kind of thing—working, doing something, writing some Lisp program. And he’d come shuffling in with his ceramic mug of beer, bare feet, and he’d just stand behind me. I’d say hi. And he’d grunt or say nothing. He’d just stand there watching me type. At some point I’d do something and he’d go, “Ptthh, wrong!” and he’d walk away. So that was kind of getting thrown in the deep end. It was like the Zen approach—the master hit me with a stick, now I must meditate.
Seibeclass="underline" I emailed Fahlman and he said that you were talented and learned very fast. But he also mentioned that you were kind of undisciplined. As he put it, “We tried gently to teach him about working in a group with others and about writing code that you, or someone else, could understand a month from now.” Do you remember any of those lessons?
Zawinski: Not the learning of them, I guess. Certainly one of the most important things is writing code you can come back to later. But I’m about to be 39 and I was 15 at the time, so it’s all a little fuzzy.
Seibeclass="underline" What year did that start?
Zawinski: That must have been ’84 or ’85. I think I started in the summer between 10th and 11th grade. After high school, at 4:00 or so I’d head over there and stay until eight or nine. I don’t think I did that every day but I was there a fair amount.
Seibeclass="underline" And you very briefly went to CMU after you finished high school.
Zawinski: Yeah. What happened was, I hated high school. It was the worst time of my life. And when I was about to graduate I asked Fahlman if he’d hire me full-time and he said, “No, but I’ve got these friends who’ve got a startup; go talk to them.” Which was Expert Technologies—ETI. I guess he was on their board. They were making this expert system to automatically paginate the yellow pages. They were using Lisp and I knew a couple of the people already who had been in Fahlman’s group. They hired me and that was all going fine, and then about a year later I panicked: Oh my god, I completely lucked into both of these jobs; this is never going to happen again. Once I no longer work here I’m going to be flipping burgers if I don’t have a college degree, so what I ought to do is go get one of those.
The plan was that I’d be working part-time at ETI and then I’d be going to school part time. That turned into working full-time and going to school full-time and that lasted, I think, six weeks. Maybe it was nine weeks. I know it lasted long enough that I’d missed the add/drop period, so I didn’t get any of my money back. But not long enough that I actually got any grades. So it’s questionable whether I actually went.
It was just awful. When you’re in high school, everyone tells you, “There’s a lot of repetitive bullshit and standardized tests; it’ll all be better once you’re in college.” And then you get to your first year of college and they’re like, “Oh, no—it gets better when you’re in grad school.” So it’s just same shit, different day—I couldn’t take it. Getting up at eight in the morning, memorizing things. They wouldn’t let me opt out of this class called Introduction to Facilities where they teach you how to use a mouse. I was like, “I’ve been working at this university for a year and a half—I know how to use a mouse.” No way out of it—“It’s policy.” All kinds of stuff like that. I couldn’t take it. So I dropped out. And I’m glad I did.
Then I worked at ETI for four years or so until the company started evaporating. We were using TI Explorer Lisp machines at ETI so I spent a lot of my time, besides actually working on the expert system, just sort of messing around with user-interface stuff and learning how those machines worked from the bottom up. I loved them—I loved digging around in the operating system and just figuring out how it all fit together.