Coders At Work

Vladimir Sedach writes "Aside from authoring narrowly focused technical books, teaching university courses, or mentoring others in the workplace, programmers don't often get a chance to pass on the knowledge of the practise of programming as a profession. Peter Seibel's Coders at Work takes fifteen world-class programmers and distills their wisdom into a book of interviews with each of them." Keep reading for Vladimir's review. Coders at Work author Peter Seibel pages 632 publisher Apress rating 8 reviewer Vladimir Sedach ISBN 978-1430219484 summary How the best programmers in the world do their job The list of coders interviewed includes some geek household names like Donald Knuth and jwz, but also some not so well-known ones such as Bernie Cosell (one of the programmers behind the ARPANET IMP, the first Internet router) and Fran Allen (compiler pioneer). The full list of people interviewed is available on the book's website. The eras embodied by the interviewees range from the very beginnings of software as we know it today, to the heyday of the Internet boom, when people like Brad Fitzpatrick made their mark.

Seibel himself is a coder and author (having the well-received Practical Common Lisp under his belt). It is then no surprise that the interviews are packed with technical details, which (with one exception, explained below) restricts the intended audience of the book to those already familiar with programming.

Coders at Work manages to communicate the wisdom of programmers of bygone eras, while simultaneously being heavily colored by very contemporary issues. JavaScript, its consequences and its discontents, is a topic recurring throughout the book. More than just a recounting of history, Coders at Work should inspire readers to learn about the wider context of their craft and stop the reinvention of the proverbial wheel decried by several of the interviewees in its pages.

Given the related subject matter, the people interviewed in Coders at Work who played a role in creating major programming languages (Armstrong, Eich, and Steele), and close publication dates of the two books, inevitable comparisons will be drawn between Coders at Work and Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden's Masterminds of Programming (I previously reviewed Masterminds of Programming on my blog). There is a lot of common ground between the two books in terms of technical areas covered, but Coders at Work clearly comes out on top.

Part of the reason has to do with the fact that Seibel's choice of interviewees is stellar. Masterminds of Programming's niche focus on programming language designers meant that its authors had a tougher job than Seibel, but details like the omission of Alan Kay (creator of Smalltalk and one of the most influential programming language designers in the field's history) from Masterminds are nothing short of dumbfounding.

Just as important to making Coders at Work a good book is the fact that Seibel is a great interviewer. Seibel's questions felt more open-ended than those in Masterminds, and the resulting interviews have a flow and narrative that makes them engrossing to read and gives the programmers interviewed a chance to explore details in-depth.

A refreshing aspect of Coders at Work are the interviewees who don't shy away from strong opinions or humor, as shown in this remark by Peter Deutsch, "I think Larry Wall has a lot of nerve talking about language design--Perl is an abomination as a language." One aspect where Coders unintentionally shines is as a guide to finding and hiring programming talent. Even non-technical managers will benefit greatly by reading those excerpts of the interviews concerned with hiring programmers.

Another unexpected aspect of the book is the breadth of topics discussed — everything from debugging machine code to women's issues in computing workplace and education.

One area where Coders could stand improvement is in its length. Not all of the coders interviewed possessed the gift of brevity, and many interview answers could have been edited to reduce their length without affecting the message.

In her interview, Fran Allen makes an interesting assertion — programming and computer science need to become more socially relevant. Other scientific and engineering fields are filled with well-known personalities, described in prominent interviews, biographies, and major Hollywood films. The only "software people" to appear in the public spotlight are the CEOs of major software firms. Ultimately, its role in helping programming assert its status as a socially relevant profession may be the most important contribution of Coders at Work.

You can purchase Coders at Work from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Microserfs

[proslack]

I still think "Microserfs" is the best book about coders, ever. I worked as a programmer in Seattle for a year back in the late 90's and it was pretty much dead on.

Re:Microserfs

[micromuncher]

Nah, Death March by Yourdon. I re-read it frequently and it never loses its luster.

Re:Microserfs

[RetroGeek]

The look of disappointment on the faces of the major news anchors was priceless and underscored their severe lack of understanding of technology.

It was if someone had said that a bridge needs repairs (the experts can see the rot), the billions were spent fixing the bridge and when the first person crossed the bridge it did not collapse. Then they whine that there is no sensational story, that the bridge would not have fallen anyway and why was the money spent, what a waste?

I hate news people. I find them shallow, news bite hunting morons.

Women's issues in computing workplace

[Dystopian Rebel]

I know I am not alone in deploring the puerile comments and immature attitudes of male programmers.

In every computing workplace where I have worked, men have behaved like sex-crazed animals and women have *never* felt comfortable working topless.

Re:Socially relevent

[Beardo the Bearded]

Same goes for engineers. Name a well-known ... engineer. I'll wait ...

Rowan Atkinson has a Master's in Electrical Engineering.

Re:Biggest Gripe about coding .. shouldn't be code

[oatworm]

Ah yes, "They Don't Make Them Like They Used To."

Bugs have been around forever. Q/A has been troublesome since the beginning - heck, many of the problems outlined in the Unix Hater's Handbook were the direct result of poor Q/A throughout the... erm... Unixverse. Bloated code? That's been around as long as there's been code - heck, INTERCAL was explicitly designed to produce it! People with no background in IT making decisions and overruling experience? That's also been happening for ages.

That said, I'll give you credit on one thing - yeah, your code was tight, purposeful and optimized for speed or size, at least as far as the machine was concerned. You didn't have a choice. Instead of focusing on maintainability or ease of understanding, programmers had to bend to the machine's thinking instead of the other way around since there just wasn't enough machine to tolerate human weakness. Eventually, though, computers became powerful enough where programming could stop focusing on getting every last clock cycle's worth by any means necessary and more on solving programming problems quickly and easily. Put another way, the programmer's time finally became more valuable than the machine's time. Once that happened, the rules changed - something which those some of those people with "no background in IT" figured out years ago (I hear it's because they had a background in some dark discipline called "accounting") and which a lot of IT people still can't wrap their minds around.