ACM Queue - A Conversation with Tim Bray

This is brilliant! ACM Queue is publishing an interview with Tim Bray (of XML fame) done by Jim Gray (of data cube and database transactions fame). Tim now runs Web technologies for Sun Microsystems. Tim Bray basically says that RDF and Semantic Web are a no go but we knew that’s what he thought.

However, there are many cool quotes. Try to find the pattern in these:

My CEO, Tom Jenkins, agreed to turn me loose to work on it myself, and I spent six months basically doing nothing else and built the crawler and the interfaces. (…) I lost weeks and weeks and weeks of sleep, hacking and patching and kludging to keep this thing on the air under the pressure of the load.

Lark was the first XML processor, implemented in Java. I wrote it myself. I used it also as a vehicle to learn Java. It shipped in January 1997 and actually got used by a bunch of people. (…) So, I let Lark go. It was fun to write and I think it was helpful, but it hasn’t been maintained since 1998.

Some of the people working in syndication were extremely upset about XML’s strictness, saying, “Well, you know, people just can’t be expected to generate well-formed data.” And I said, “Yes they can.” I went looking around and found that there are some quite decent libraries capable of doing that for Java and Perl and Python, but there didn’t seem to be one for C.

So sitting on the beach in Australia I wrote this little library in C called Genx that generates XML efficiently and guarantees that it is well-formed and canonical.

See the pattern? Tim Bray is a hacker with a degree in mathematics and computer science. [Tim doesn't have a graduate degree.] And he changed the world.

But his life was not always easy:

Microsoft really went insane. There was a major meltdown and a war, and I was temporarily fired as XML coeditor. There was an aggressive attempt to destroy my career over that.

(Note that the interviewer, Jim Gray, works for Microsoft!)