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Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming 1st ed. Edition

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This is a who's who in the programming world - a fascinating look at how some of the best in the world do their work. Patterned after the best selling Founders at Work, the book represents two years of interviews with some of the top programmers of our times.

ISBN-10

1430219483
ISBN-13

978-1430219484
Edition

1st ed.
Publisher

Apress
Publication date

September 16, 2009
Language

English
Dimensions

7.01 x 1.43 x 10 inches
Print length

632 pages
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Peter Seibel is a serious developer of long standing. In the early days of the Web, he hacked Perl for Mother Jones and Organic Online. He participated in the Java revolution as an early employee at WebLogic which, after its acquisition by BEA, became the cornerstone of the latter's rapid growth in the J2EE sphere. He has also taught Java programming at UC Berkeley Extension. He is the author of Practical Common LISP from Apress.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Apress; 1st ed. edition (September 16, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 632 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1430219483
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1430219484
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.43 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.01 x 1.43 x 10 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #549,122 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #62 in Business Operations Research (Books)
- #613 in Microsoft Programming (Books)
- #700 in Software Development (Books)

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Peter Seibel

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Peter Seibel is either a writer turned programmer or programmer turned writer. After picking up an undergraduate degree in English and working briefly as a journalist, he was seduced by the web. In the early '90s he hacked Perl for Mother Jones magazine and Organic Online. He participated in the Java revolution as an early employee at WebLogic and later taught Java programming at UC Berkeley Extension. Peter is also one of the few second-generation Lisp programmers on the planet and was a childhood shareholder in Symbolics, Inc.

In 2003 he quit his job as the architect of a Java-based transactional messaging system to hack Lisp for a year. Instead he ended up spending two years writing a book, the Jolt Productivity Award winning Practical Common Lisp. His most recent book is Coders at Work, a collection of Q&A interviews with fifteen notable programmers and computer scientists.

When not writing books and programming computers Peter enjoys practicing tai chi. He live in Berkeley, California, with his wife Lily, daughters Amelia and Tabitha, and their dog Mahlanie.

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B. Butler

Excellent Pleasure Reading...with insights

Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2009

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*Spoiler*: The last bit of the last sentence of the last interview in this book is "don't only read the people who code like you."

At least one reviewer has complained that this title didn't "detail" how these programmers worked and how they approached programming. I must thoroughly disagree. The opinions of these people on common points of disagreement from type systems to tools and coding styles to debugging methods was explored. If you are hoping that you will be able to watch the subjects solve a complex problem or go through a typical day's work than you are in the wrong place. This isn't a screencast or a tutorial. On the other hand, there are a wide variety of opinions on display from experts in different areas of the field across different generations on numerous contentious issues.

This book is filled with words worth chewing on. On the first read, the interviews of Crockford, Deutsch, Eich, and Peyton-Jones stuck out to me in particular. In subsequent readings I expect that set to be different. All of the interviewees did agree on the importance of one thing, reading and writing code. For a beginner, this book is likely to point out some pitfalls that otherwise would've been missed and suggests valuable sources of intuition and insight. Perhaps most importantly, it may help popularize some knowledge of the history of our field. As Knuth laments, "The idea that people knew a thing or two in the '70s is strange to a lot of young programmers." There is some valuable distilled experience and wisdom here. At the very least, the book should help you hash over your own opinions on the issues discussed.

15 people found this helpful

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Mihai Bojin

A truly inspiring book!

Reviewed in the United States on April 12, 2011

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Coders at Work is organized into several interviews with prominent computer scientists, engineers, programmers and hackers (each seeing himself differently as regards to belonging in one of these categories).

Most of these masterminds started programming on punchcards on PDP-I machines in Assembler, running software on timeshares and debugging both software and hardware. Most of them have worked with LISP, almost all of them feel that there is something wrong with C++, some contributed on creating or improving programming languages like Javascript, Java, Smalltalk, Haskell, Erlang, Fortran and LISP, one of them developed the original UNIX implementation, another contributed on writing the software for the first ARPANET nodes which later grew into what we know today as the Internet and a few others have written cool software like the Netscape Navigator, Livejournal and memcached. One notable interview is with Donald Knuth, the author of the multi-volume work "The Art of Computer Programming" who is though of as the father of algorithm analysis and who invented "literate programming".

After reading this book I found myself wanting to learn more about systems programming and while I probably will always work in application programming, I now have a new found respect for the hard work that these scientists and hackers have put throughout their life-long careers.

This book is a must read for any passionate programmer who is interested about the history and the early developments made in the software industry, developments that made today's technologies possible!

2 people found this helpful

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Erik Gfesser

Fascinating interviews with 15 renowned software developers

Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2010

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Despite the title, which uses the term "coder" to describe the software developer, this 600-page series of 15 interviews by Seibel is actually quite fascinating. In the words of the author, the questions he posed to these accomplished software developers are varied, revolving around "how they learned to do it, what they've discovered along the way, and what they think about its future". While these were some of the questions asked of all interviewees, like any good journalist Seibel used these as starter questions, going on unique tangents for each along the way. This reviewer noticed that several readers had expected some type of how-to guide by each individual interviewed, but the content here is composed of discussion points, as the subtitle suggests. If you enjoy interviews in the software space, such as those that one might regularly find on InfoQ, you will probably enjoy this collection.

Though weighty, there are numerous great sound bites throughout. Jamie Zawinski, "one of the prime movers behind [...], the organization that took the Netscape browser open source", is quoted as saying "I hope I don't sound like I'm saying, 'Testing is for chumps.' It's not. It's a matter of priorities. Are you trying to write good software or are you trying to be done by next week? You can't do both. One of the jokes we made at Netscape a lot was, 'We're absolutely 100 percent committed to quality. We're going to ship the highest-quality product we can on March 31st." Seibel poses the following question to Douglas Crockford, inventor of JSON: "In one of your talks you quoted Exodus 23:10 and 11: 'And six years thou shalt sow thy land, and shalt gather in the fruits thereof: But the seventh year thou shalt let it rest and lie still' and suggested that every seventh sprint should be spent cleaning up code. What is the right time frame for that?" To which Crockford replies: "Six cycles - whatever the cycle is between when you ship something. If you're on a monthly delivery cycle then I think every half year you should skip a cycle and just spend time cleaning the code up."

Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript, later comments: "Abstraction is powerful. What I'm really allergic to, and what I had a bad reaction to in the '90s, was all the CORBA, COM, DCOM, object-oriented nonsense. Every startup of the day had some crazy thing that would take 200,000 method calls to start up and print 'hello, world'. That's a travesty; you don't want to be a programmer associated with that sort of thing. At SGI, the kernel, of course, was where the real programmers with chest hair went, and there you couldn't screw around. Kernel malloc was a new thing; we still used fixed-sized tables, and we panicked when we filled them up. Staying close to the metal was my way of keeping honest and avoiding the bulls***, but now, you know, with time and better, faster hardware and an evolutionary winnowing process of good abstractions versus bad, I think people can operate above that level and not know assembly and still be good programmers and write tight code."

Joshua Bloch, Chief Java Architect at Google at the time this book was written, comments that "there's this problem, which is, programming is so much of an intellectual meritocracy and often these people are the smartest people in the organization; therefore they figure they should be allowed to make all the decisions. But merely the fact that they're the smartest people in the organization doesn't mean they should be making all the decisions, because intelligence is not a scalar quantity; it's a vector quantity. And if you lack empathy or emotional intelligence, then you shouldn't be designing APIs or GUIs or languages. What we're doing is an aesthetic pursuit. It involves craftsmanship as well as mathematics and it involves people skills and prose skills - all of these things that we don't necessarily think of as engineering but without which I don't think you'll ever be a really good engineer."

Summarized as the "mother" of Smalltalk (the counterpart to Alan Kay, the "father" of Smalltalk), Dan Ingalls comments that "people should learn to think clearly and to question. And to me it's very basic. If you grow up in a family where when the cupboard door doesn't close right, somebody opens it up and looks at the hinge and sees that a screw is loose and therefore it's hanging this way vs. if they say, 'Oh, the door doesn't work right; call somebody' - there's a difference there. To me you don't need any involvement with computers to have that experience of what you see isn't right, what do you do? Inquire. Look. And then if you see the problem, how do you fix it? To me it's so basic and human and comes so much from parent to child. Computers are certainly a medium for doing that. But they're just computers. There's a lot of that that will transfer, but to me it's really big and basic and human, so it's not like we're going to enlighten the world just by teaching them computers."

36 people found this helpful

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Roman Seidelsohn

Unterhaltsames und inspirierendes Werk

Reviewed in Germany on February 21, 2023

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Die Interviews sind von spätestens 2009 und zahlreiche Themen sind für mich unverständlich, dennoch liest sich das Buch für einen Entwickler wie Prosa, macht richtig Spaß und ist sehr inspirierend.
Ich kann es nur empfehlen. Die Interviews sind abwechslungsreich und sehr gut geführt und man lernt durchauch auch von der jahrzehntelangen Erfahrung der "alten Hasen".
Für Entwickler eine unbedingte Leseempfehlung.

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anish

Must read

Reviewed in India on January 25, 2019

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Must read

ARMSTRONG

Awesome book it's must read

Reviewed in Italy on February 17, 2018

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Awesome book really enjoying reading it at the moment.. I would recommend this book to anyone in the computer science field o anyone interested how the great minds of the I. T WORLD STARTED OUT

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Poupon philippe

Trés interresant

Reviewed in France on November 30, 2016

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Ce n'est pas un livre de programmation, ce sont des développeurs reconnu qui explique leur parcours professionnel, leur façon de travailler, leurs méthodes, leur motivation ...
Très intéressant, je suis un vieux développeur et cela m'a conforté dans plusieurs de mes positions et de mes pratiques, de voir tout ces avis de figure connu de l'art du développement.
Cela remet en perspective beaucoup de chose à la mode aujourd'hui !

2 people found this helpful

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Mr. B. Hughes

Great insights

Reviewed in Canada on June 25, 2012

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The programmers interviewed in this book seem to range from guys in their early-30s to the elder statesmen of the programming world who hark back to the days of huge, basement-filling machines and programming-by-punchcards.

It's great reading if you are interested in the history of the profession and craft. There is plenty of debate about how important mathematical knowledge is or isn't to programmers and how the overall programming landscape - and the resulting demands on programmers - are changing, just to touch on one or two of the themes.

Apart from anything else, this has inspired me to hunt down and read some of the other books referenced within the interviews. I highly recommend this for anyone who wants an insight into how others enter this sector and how they approach problems once within it.

One person found this helpful

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