Success Quote by Bill Joy

Gatekeeping often hides in plain sight as “usability,” and Bill Joy’s line is an unusually candid admission of that power dynamic. He’s not defending UNIX’s notorious steep learning curve; he’s narrowing the problem to a single chokepoint: the editor. In early UNIX culture, your editor wasn’t just a tool, it was the interface to the entire system. If you couldn’t comfortably create and modify text, you couldn’t program, configure, or even participate. Complaints about “UNIX being hard” were, in practice, complaints about the social cost of learning the sanctioned rituals.

Joy’s intent reads as pragmatic: remove friction, silence the chorus, keep the machine (and its community) moving. The subtext is more interesting. He’s saying complexity is acceptable when it’s “earned,” but intolerable when it’s merely obstructive. That’s a values statement dressed up as a gripe. It also hints at a product-minded instinct that feels almost anachronistic in the era’s macho computing ethos: users matter, not because they’re delicate, but because their frustration is a drag on adoption and momentum.

Context sharpens it. Joy is inseparable from vi, the editor designed to be fast, modal, and available on scarce hardware. “Too complicated” likely points at the divide between powerful but baroque tools (think TECO-ed lineage) and something you could actually get fluent in without surrendering a weekend. The quote captures UNIX’s recurring bargain: stay sharp, stay minimal, but don’t confuse difficulty with virtue.