Coders At Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming by Peter Seibel
I really enjoyed this book. Peter Seibel did an outstanding job in selecting a group of interviewees that are both legendary and represent a wide range of programming domains. In addition, Peter's questions were similar enough to allow comparisons between responses but maintained a conversational flow that prevented the interviews from feeling formulaic. Ehud Lamm's quote from the font cover perhaps says it best, "reading this book may be the next best thing to chatting with these illustrious programmers in person".
I read the interviews out of order based on my interests. All were good but my favorite ones were (in no particular order):
- Donald Knuth
- Peter Norvig
- Dan Ingalls
- Guy Steele
- Brendan Eich
- Bernie Cosell
- Simon Peyton Jones
- L Peter Deutsch
- Jamie Zawinski
- Brad Fitzpatrick
One striking observation was how many of the interviewees fit into Malcolm Gladwell's definition of an Outlier. Nearly all of them had opportunities to get a significant amount of programming experience at a young age and serendipitously found jobs that provided the right environment for them to succeed.
I also found interesting the "organic" approach most of the interviewees took to programming. None seemed to rely on formalized best practices but instead used their intuition to tailor their approach based on the task at hand. To me this suggests that you just can't codify great programming which matches my experiences with the great programmers that I have known.
Finally, it's notable how many of the people interviewed either starting out hacking Lisp or were heavily influenced by it. Of course this may be due to selection bias given that the author, Peter Seibel, is a a Lisp hacker himself and wrote the outstanding book Practical Common Lisp. As a Lisp fan, I don't mind the potential bias; it's a feature, not a bug!
