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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

2009
September 16
Language

EN
English
Dimensions

7.0 x 1.4 x 10.0
inches
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: #852,854 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #96 in Business Operations Research (Books)
- #844 in Microsoft Programming (Books)
- #948 in Software Development (Books)

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4.5 317 ratings

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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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4.5 out of 5

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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.

6 people found this helpful

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Go to the source, Dude

Reviewed in the United States on October 13, 2009

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In Peter Seibel's "Coders At Work", Donald Knuth tells him "... so to me reading source materials is great enrichment for my own life and creativity". And Peter Seibel goes to the source materials, to many of the best coders of our time to discover nuggets on the craft of programming. Now interviews of great practitioners generally don't come off well--the quality of the interview is limited by the knowledge of the interviewer. Not so in this case, as Peter is both a life-long programmer and long-time journalist. Thus, he knows which questions to ask and leads the conversation down a fruitful path. A mixture of thoughtful answers to questions like "Do you use TDD" and "What sort of IDE do you use", and "what about C pointers" will give you fresh insights to things you thought you understood. The coders that were selected for the book include Donald Knuth (the IDE he used for TeX was pencil and paper), Ken Thompson, Fran Allen, Guy Steel (who seems to have used every programming language known, and is an authority on several)--a total of 15 of the best coders.

And there are war stories. What was it like building Netscape or Ghostscript or Javascript? How did you scale? What led to the need for memcached? What led to Erlang? Haskell?

And questions about live topics of today: What do you really think about C++? Shouldn't we be proving our programs correct? Should code be documented? What is Joe's law of debugging? Who has NOT read "Worse is Better"? Some of the answers might surprise and enlighten you.

I found it impossible to put this book down. It might affect your productivity for a couple of days, but I think you will think about programming a little differently.

I strongly recommend this book for programmers and people who have programmers in their life.

5 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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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

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.

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

Verified Purchase

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

Poupon philippe

Trés interresant

Reviewed in France on November 30, 2016

Verified Purchase

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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