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

by Peter Seibel (Author)

170 ratings

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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.

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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: #124,208 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #21 in Business Operations Research (Books)
- #81 in Software Design & Engineering
- #218 in Software Development (Books)

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Top reviews from the United States

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Scott J Pearson

Human interest about computer programming - a winning combination

Reviewed in the United States on November 26, 2020

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Software developers are typically bright people but possess few social contacts who approach the world like them. Such loneliness is famously parodied by stereotypes. Even the most social among us have a difficult time relating to others what programming is like. In this work, Seibel provides interviews with 15 accomplished programmers and alleviates some of that alone-ness. In so doing, he explains to the English-speaking world how computer programming has grown and is currently practiced.

The interviewees compose a veritable who’s who of computer science – including, at the end, Donald Knuth, who is widely regarded as the best programmer of all time. Fran Allen, a widely recognized female programmer, is included. Some were educated well at Harvard or MIT. Others were, to a large degree, self-taught before the discipline of computer science was established. All convey a unique perspective about how they write code.

For the most part, Seibel asks each person a similar set of questions: about their background, formative experiences, approach to the craft of coding, and their approach to a new trend of literate programming. It’s amazing to see how wide the range of different opinions is! They all seem to disagree, especially about very important things. Providing room for (sometimes heated) disagreements is healthy for computer programmers who are smart but have few companions. After all, we must work together to accomplish work.

This is not a technical work. Neither code nor math is presented. It’s more of a biographical work of 16 different programmers. It spans the lanes of human interest and computer science. Non-programmers might be interested in learning how IT people work, but the obvious audience here consists of software developers. By grabbing big-name interviews, Seibel hits the sweet spot for this audience and knocks a homer out of the park.

In particular, expositions such as this allow people to see the history of computing. Readers get to see innovators, spanning back to the 1950s until the date of publication in 2009. These people changed the world such that a mini-computer resides in many people’s pockets in the developed world, in the form of a smart phone. They went from coding in assembly code to writing in higher-level languages to co-writing in more everyday language. That history of science will be of interest to readers in the future when future students seek to learn about the “old days” when computers were young. And we will have the writer Peter Seibel to thank.

One person found this helpful

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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."

33 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

Trove of wisdom

Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2020

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Each interview has great depth and wisdom. Learned a lot about how to improve as a programmer. A student of the history of programming will appreciate a look at the minds behind the influential software of the past.

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cmp

Has become one of my programming favorites

Reviewed in the United States on August 28, 2016

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I really like this book for the feeling that these people who have accomplished so much are just like me and do not do anything insane to achieve what they have. Many of their stories are like my own.

Sometimes we take the leaders of an industry and blow their importance and worth out of proportion: "Only THEY could have done it." That doesn't make their accomplishment any lesser and I like that this book shows the humanity that hides behind code and products they've built.

5 people found this helpful

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Pablo

Rekindled my love for the craft of coding

Reviewed in the United States on November 23, 2009

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This book is just a bunch of interviews with some programmers you might recognize and some you may not. It seems to be pretty lightly edited and some people may find some sections boring (and others may not)! "Coders at Work" is a fascinating insight into the education, careers and minds of some pretty big names in the field. I ordered the book before reading some of the negative reviews and I'm very glad I did. I almost hesitated to start reading it thinking that it was going to be boring and dry but it wasn't. Yes, there is definitely heavy use of acronyms and terms that I wasn't familiar with but to me it was a learning opportunity and a chance to dig a little deeper to figure out what the interviewees were talking about.

It's tough to predict if this book will appeal to you. If you're a seasoned software industry professional with a deep love for the 'craft' of coding then you'll love this collection if interviews. I certainly did and it reminded me of why I got into this industry in the first place and it rekindled a love for coding.

8 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

J. Erlank

A great read, dip into it at random or read it cover to cover.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 24, 2009

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This is like a history textbook of the computing generation.

It's basically a collection of interviews with notable programmers, done in a very natural and readable style. If you're a techie, or you're in the technology industry in any way, then you should read it to get a sense of where "it" all came from, and especially to hear from some of the people who made it happen.

The contrast between the different interviews is interesting in its own right - you can go from one guy to the next to get a completely different or even opposing viewpoint, so the end result is a broad perspective.

It made me nostalgic for those days I spent hunched over a ZX Spectrum keyboard POKEing memory to see what happened :-)

11 people found this helpful

John

Essential reading for anyone interested in the craft of programming

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 17, 2010

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I really enjoyed this book. Each of the interviees had an interesting tale to tell and the questions Siebel asks are well targeted to bring these out. While not an overly technical book there is enough depth here to give an insight into how different the programming process is for different people and how their approaches differ.

While there are some interesting lessons to learn from these experiences, this is not a book about learning programming skills but about the history,thoughts and motivations of programmers who have demonstrated their ability through the significant projects they have been involved in.

The interviews seemed about the right length to me and I found this format made it a good book to dip into occasionally, partly to ration it out otherwise I'd have read it all in one go!

Highly recommended.

Dave S

I originally book the Kindle version and it was only ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 7, 2017

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I originally book the Kindle version and it was only when I got the hard copy did I realise how big this book is. Interviews with famous programmers - one of two I could care less about - but there were interviews with others that I'd never heard before that have actually changed the way I view programming.

Marcus

Valuable insight into how real programmers think

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 10, 2011

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A book of interviews with programmers: why would that be interesting? It is because Siebel asks just the sorts of practical questions you would want to ask if you were face to face with Donald Knuth, or the other great practitioners of the craft in this book. How do you do debugging? Where do you use asserts? What questions do you ask at interviews? This book should rate alongside The Little Lisper or The Art of Computer Programming as one of the must-buy books for programmers.

Howard

The concept sounds good but in reality it's rather dull

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 19, 2014

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As a coder I bought this because Joel Spolsky said I should. And it does have moments of interest but mainly it's fairly dull and rambling. Coders chatting about stuff might sound good but unless they're solving the sort of problems you face every day it's pretty uninteresting and of little value. I've read about half on my Kindle but I doubt I'll read the rest.