Bil Joy in 2001

The Joy of Programming

By Malcolm Gladwell
The Guardian, November 15, 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

Outliers: The Story Of Success
By Malcolm Gladwell
Allen Lane, 320 pages

Bill Joy came to the University of Michigan the year the computer centre opened, at the age of 16. He had been voted "most studious student" by his graduating class at high school. From then on, the computer centre was his life. In 1975, Joy enrolled in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he buried himself even deeper in the world of computer software. Working in collaboration with a small group of programmers, Joy took on the task of rewriting Unix. Joy's version remains the operating system on which millions of computers around the world run. After Berkeley, Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems. There, he rewrote Java, and his legend grew still further.

In the early 1990s, the psychologist K Anders Ericsson and two colleagues set up shop at Berlin's elite Academy of Music. With the help of the academy's professors, they divided the school's violinists into three groups. The first group were the stars, the second were those judged to be merely "good", and the third were students who intended to be music teachers in the school system. All the violinists were then asked the same question. Over the course of your career, ever since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practised?

Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the same time, around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone practised roughly the same amount, about two or three hours a week. But around the age of eight real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up as the best in their class began to practise more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the age of 20 they were practising well over 30 hours a week. By the age of 20, the elite performers had all totalled 10,000 hours of practice over the course of their lives. The merely good students had totalled, by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers just over 4,000 hours.

Ericsson and his colleagues couldn't find any "naturals" who could float effortlessly to the top while practising a fraction of the time that their peers did. Nor could they find "grinds", people who worked harder than everyone else and yet just didn't have what it takes to break into the top ranks. Their research suggested that once you have enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. The people at the very top work much, much harder than everyone else.

Researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours, which is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

Ten thousand hours is an enormous amount of time. It's all but impossible to reach that number, by the time you're a young adult, all by yourself. You have to have parents who are encouraging and supportive. You can't be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won't be enough time left over in the day.

So, back to Bill Joy. It's 1971 and he's 16. He's the maths wiz, the kind of student that schools like MIT, Caltech or the University of Waterloo attract by the hundreds. Computers were hard to get access to, and renting time on them cost a fortune. This was the era when computer programs were created using punch cards. "Programming with cards," one computer scientist from the era remembers, "did not teach you programming. It taught you patience and proofreading."

The University of Michigan was one of the first universities in the world to abandon computer cards for the brand-new system called "time-sharing". No more punch cards. You could build dozens of terminals, link them all to the mainframe by a telephone line, and have everyone programming at once.

This was the opportunity that greeted Bill Joy when he arrived on the Ann Arbor campus in the autumn of 1971. "Do you know what the difference is between the computing cards and time-sharing?" Joy says. "It's the difference between playing chess by mail and speed chess." Programming wasn't an exercise in frustration any more. It was fun.

According to Joy, he spent a phenomenal amount of time at the computer centre. "It was open 24 hours. I would stay there all night, and just walk home in the morning. In an average week in those years I was spending more time in the computer centre than on my classes."

Because Joy happened to go to a far-sighted school, he was able to practise on a time-sharing system, instead of punch cards. Because the university was willing to spend the money to keep the computer centre open 24 hours, he could stay up all night. And because he was able to put in so many hours, by the time he was given the opportunity to rewrite Unix, he was up to the task. Bill Joy was brilliant. But someone had to give him the opportunity to become an expert.

"At Michigan, I was probably programming eight or 10 hours a day," he says. "By the time I was at Berkeley, I was doing it day and night." He pauses for a moment, to do the maths in his head. "It's five years," he says, finally. "So, so, maybe ... 10,000 hours? That's about right."

Is this a general rule of success? Let's test the idea with two examples: the Beatles and Bill Gates.

The Beatles — John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr — came to the United States in February 1964. Lennon and McCartney began playing together in 1957. The time that elapsed between their founding and their greatest artistic achievements is about 10 years. In 1960, while they were still a struggling school rock band, they were invited to play in Hamburg, Germany.

What was special about Hamburg was the sheer amount of time the band was forced to play. John Lennon later said this about the band's performances at a Hamburg club: "In Liverpool, we'd only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing."

The Beatles travelled to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962. All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, they had performed live an estimated 1,200 times. Most bands today don't perform 1,200 times in their entire careers.

"They were no good on stage when they went there and they were very good when they came back," says Beatles biographer Philip Norman. "They learned not only stamina, they had to learn an enormous amount of numbers — cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock'n'roll, a bit of jazz, too. They weren't disciplined on stage at all before that. But when they came back they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them."

Bill Gates was a brilliant young maths wiz who discovered computer programming. Dropped out of Harvard. Started a little computer company called Microsoft with his friends.

Gates' father was a wealthy lawyer in Seattle, and his mother was the daughter of a well-to-do banker. As a child Gates was precocious, and easily bored by his studies. So his parents took him out of public school and sent him to a private school that catered to elite families. Midway through Gates' second year, the school started a computer club, equipped with an ASR-33 Teletype, a time-sharing terminal with a direct link to a mainframe computer in downtown Seattle. "The whole idea of time-sharing only got invented in 1965," Gates says.

From that moment on, Gates lived in the computer room. He and a number of others began to teach themselves how to use this strange new device. The parents raised more money to buy time on the mainframe computer. The students spent it. In one seven-month period in 1971, Gates and his cohorts ran up 1,575 hours of computer time on the mainframe, which averages out at eight hours a day, seven days a week. "It was my obsession," Gates said.

Those five years, from eighth grade to the end of high school, were Bill Gates' Hamburg, He was presented with an even more extraordinary series of opportunities than Bill Joy. And virtually every one of those opportunities gave Gates extra time to practise. By the time he dropped out of Harvard, he'd been programming nonstop for seven consecutive years. He was way past 10,000 hours.

Joy, Gates and the Beatles are all undeniably talented. A good part of that "talent", however, was something other than an innate aptitude for music or maths. It was desire. The Beatles were willing to play for eight hours straight, seven days a week. Joy was willing to stay up all night programming. A key part of what it means to be talented is being able to practise for hours and hours.

Veterans of Silicon Valley will tell you that the most important date in the history of the personal computer revolution was January 1975. That was when the magazine Popular Electronics ran a cover story on a machine called the Altair 8800. The Altair cost $397. It was a do-it-yourself contraption that you could assemble at home.

January 1975 was the dawn of the personal computer age. The perfect age to be in 1975 is young enough to see the coming revolution but not so old as to have missed it. You want to be 20 or 21, born in 1954 or 1955.

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, was born on October 28, 1955.

Paul Allen, the other co-founder of Microsoft, was born on January 21, 1953.

Steve Ballmer, the present CEO of Microsoft, was born on March 24, 1956.

Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, was born on February 24, 1955.

Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, was born on April 27, 1955.

Bill Joy was born on November 8, 1954.
 

AR  So I'm a few years too old to have made it big time as a programmer. I recall our introduction to punch-card computing at school: it left me interested in principle but unwilling to do all that work to compute things I'd learned to calculate approximately in my head. In 1975 I was too busy punching out the first volume of my logical trilogy on a mechanical typewriter to get my hands on the hobby computers that appeared around then.

My first hands-on experience with real computers was on the Apple Macintosh in 1989, as a Springer computer science editor. By then it was too late for me to learn to do any serious programming. I was happy enough to leverage the first "wimp" (windows — mouse — pointer) tools to pursue my own ambitions, as on this blog. Over the years I've clocked well over ten thousand hours reading and writing science and philosophy — enough for some world-class results, unless it's not too late.