His code that we have seen has universally been good. It's written in a different era, with different constraints--"how much BASIC can one cram into 16K?"--but all computers ran on 8-bit microcomputer BASIC for a time, and Bill's was good.
He wrote that about claude in 2025. Do you think now bill gates is an exceptional programmer? You take 100 random programmes today and bill gates would write better code than all? I doubt that he is now an exceptional programmer. Maybe he was, but certainly not anymore. And how much code do you think he wrote as CEO of msft?
I have no idea if Bill still dusts off the keyboard or not. I can't say. What I can say confidently: if you had a time machine and could pair up 25 year old me against 25 year old Bill, he'd win in a hacking competition.
He wrote software for controlling hydroelectric dams when he was still in high school. At a time where the tooling was incredibly worse than it is now.
What's your definition of exceptional? Because that fits mine.
Computers, programming languages, and software in general were simple back then. It didn't take much to program them. You couldn't do much with a few KB of memory and a single-core single-thread CPU with basic instructions.
It took some amount of talent to squeeze something useful into computers with those constraints, but the upper limit on complexity also put an upper limit on how exceptional anything could be.
Bill Gates is/was an exceptional businessman. His technical abilities were nothing special.
By your definition, is John Carmack an exceptional programmer? After all, Wolfenstein3d is also simple, if you ignore the challenges of limited hardware and of being an early mover who has to invent lots of things from scratch. Who from that time period would qualify?
Gates and Allen wrote an 8080 emulator on the Harvard PDP-10, then wrote Altair BASIC for the simulated 8080, which worked on the first try on a real Altair without their ever having seen one, after laboriously entering it with toggle switches at MITS in Albuquerque. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43579471>
I’d qualify this a bit by saying that in his time, it was exceptional to be a programmer at all. The barrier to entry was unimaginably higher than it is today.
I occasionally have to remind myself of that when I see 13-year-olds today do what I only did at 25. When I was 13, I was learning programming by typing in listings from flea market books, whereas today I’d use highly polished interactive tutorials. Of course people now progress much faster than at a time when it took 3 months of arcane research to make an Ethernet card work on Linux.
Bill Gates was 13 in 1968, one year before Unix. I'm not even sure what it meant to be a hobbyist programmer in 1968. Writing Fortran on paper and taking it to a local university to run?
In any case the parent's point absolutely stands - I came up in the 90s too and learning to program or make computers do things back then was largely a matter of reading books and talking to people. You had to really want it, because you had to track down and sift through the information.
And then there’ll be the inevitable “I have to work with that person for how long!?” And the fiefdoms will be set up, and the back stabbing will begin.
That’s before we even consider the effect of the unelected bureaucracy and the power of the lobby groups and foreign interests.
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