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Bill Gates



I think you're being a little unfairly downvoted. I don't think anyone would claim Gates should win prizes for minimal or beautiful code.

But he certainly did a lot of good programming.

In any hall of fame where we mention Linus, Guido and Bernstein we probably do need to mention Gates as well.


And where can we find any of his programs to look at?...


anything in the first few years of MS.

Altair.BASIC


Of course. But I meant the source for which he could "win prizes for minimal or beautiful code". AFAIK none of it is legally available to anyone.


I don't know whether it's legal, but http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/altair/index2.html has an annotated disassembly of Altair BASIC. I haven't given it more than the briefest glance myself, but allegedly there's some very nice stuff there. (Of course it's from a different era and no one outside deeply-embedded-land writes that sort of code any more other than for a twisted kind of fun.)


> I don't think anyone would claim Gates should win prizes for minimal or beautiful code


What well known software did Bill Gates write? DOS was purchased from another company. The oldest parts of Excel maybe?


He wrote Microsoft's original Basic, probably parts of other languages. DOS must have been changed a lot after Microsoft bought it. He may have written some of the new stuff.


What, you think DONKEY.BAS is exemplary code?




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