Larry got under my skin. I walked into a party in the Santa Cruz mountains (1987-ish?) and my then-wife said, “What the hell just happened?”
“What?”
“You stiffened up the moment we walked in. You and that guy over there are glaring daggers. Who is that?”
“Larry Tesler.”
At that point Larry and I had only interacted a bit around the OOPSLA conference. I was already in awe of him as one of the Smalltalk demi-gods from Xerox/PARC (I had practically memorized the Smalltalk issue of Byte Magazine). I knew he was at Apple, which I had just joined.
I’m still not sure what the tension was. I haven’t had that initial bristling reaction with anyone else who became a friend. Maybe we both saw ourselves as outsiders but wanted to be alpha dogs. Put two of those in a room and yeah sparks are going to fly.
A story (don’t know if this is true, but this is how it was told to me and it matches what else I know about Larry): the early Smalltalkers knew they needed a browser, a way to navigate, understand, and modify the code in the system. The core group went off to talk about it. Larry got pissed, just wrote a damn browser (the design of which, much to his disgust, persists today 45 years later), and showed it to them when they returned.
My path crossed Larry’s at Apple from 1987–1989. As head of research, Larry wrangled a bunch of bright folks figuring out where these computers we’d put on everybody’s desks were going to go next. As a late-20s geek, I had no respect for what managers did. Then Larry went on sabbatical.
Six weeks later he showed us the geological core sample browser he’d written. I was blown away. I coded all day, every day, and I couldn’t have done what he did. The beauty and utility of the system were obvious.
In a similar vein, Larry picked up the Macintosh Smalltalk product I was working on at the time and in a few hours extended the pretty printer in ways that would have taken me weeks to figure out.
My favorite Larry story is the time I was called into his office to brief him on what I was working on. He asked for an explanation of some term I used and I explained. Then, being in my late 20s and clueless and arrogant, I told him I was surprised he didn’t already know what I had just explained. Without missing a beat he said, “Kent, if I knew everything you know I’d fire you.” Boom.
The biggest lesson I learned from Larry was to reason from first principles. Following principles where they lead will take you places other, more “pragmatic”, people won’t ever get to. Some of the steps along the way may look odd, but that’s the price of principles.
Larry applied his considerable gifts to real problems for real people. He didn’t code to impress programmers, and so he both solved problems and impressed programmers.
I last saw Larry maybe 4 years ago at dinner in Grants Pass, Oregon. Larry was hippie-dippie enough to own land in Tekilma, which he was finally selling. We talked about old times. I told him how he had inspired and frightened me. He talked about being amused by the micro-celebrity attached to being the Parent Of GUIs, Slayer of Modes. That saga had ended for him and he was on to the next idea.
