Coders at work

For the holidays I finally bought Peter Seibels Coders at work, which is a very unusable book about programming: it consists solely of interviews with pretty well known programmers or “coders”. It’s an interesting constellation: On the one hand, Peter Seibel is well known in the Common Lisp community for his book Practical Common Lisp which gives a modern view on Lisp: not only is it an introduction to the language but also to several libraries and the general setting of modern lisp programming. On the other (fifteen) hands, there are people like Jamie Zawinski (XEmacs, Netscape), Don Knuth (TeX, Art of Computer Programming), Guy Steele (Lisp, Scheme, Java), Peter Norvig (PAIP, Google), Brendan Eich (Javascript) and Ken Thompson (Unix) — just to note the ones that are probably the most well known.

I’ve had resisted the urge to buy the book because I’ve always felt that programming is a craft that ultimately forces you to make your own experiences. I mean, you can read all the books you like but ultimately you have to make your own hands dirty to really get knowledge about the issues involved. So, what could I learn from other peoples experiences? On the other hand, as a lightweight (in terms of reading attention) holiday book it seemed about right, so I finally gave in.

Well, the book turned out to be a real page turner for me. It’s a fascinating read because of the re-occuring topics Seibel is addressing and the various opinions he got. He addresses topics you would expect like preferred tools (e.g. editor), worst bugs, debugging techniques, asssertions and verification, literate programming (which suprises me a little), design approaches and team work, but of course the main focus is the personal experiences and how they wound up with whatever made these guys known. One thing that I liked is that Seibel has a way to ask good follow-up questions to the responses he gets, without ever letting his own experiences or opinions getting in the way, which I can imagine has probably made for pleasant interview situations (at least I take away that impression). I wouldn’t have imagined beforehand that I would find the different stories how the guys (and one woman) got into coding so interesting. There are very few people in this book whose experience doesn’t go back to teletype and time sharing systems. Of course, as a result these stories tend to be similar, but the details differ enough that’s it doesn’t get too boring. Starting with computers in the early 80s, I don’t have any experiences with such systems and which I frankly don’t miss at all after reading more about it. But just to get to this conclusion is interesting: the constant comparison with your own experiences and opinions you can’t help but make while reading this book alone is worth buying and reading it.

Over all, it’s hard to say which interviews I found the most interesting one, essentially each has some unique point or other. That being said, the interviews with Joe Armstrong and Guy Steele made a lot of impresssion on me, whereas I’m a little disappointed by the one with Peter Norvig (though he had the funniest quotes), but I can’t really nail down why. I didn’t particular like the interview with Brad Fitzpatrick, it didn’t seem to contain as much information as the others. And Joshua Bloch seemed to hype Java all the time which I found not very convincing — the idea that todays larger context for programming contains quite a few different languages and approaches seems to elude him.

There are some points I took away from this book: For one, most of the interviewed people seem to be much more concerned with data types than I am, even the ones who have done extensiv work on dynamically or weakly typed languages. I guess I should really take a closer look at that topic and, to make it more concrete, play around with e.g. Haskell. Another point is that concurrency or parallel programming is a topic that (IIRC) all of the interviewees have seen as being responsible for the worst bugs they encountered and as a result are interested in newer approaches like STM. So, it might be worthwhile to look closer into such developments, for example by playing with Clojure, Erlang. or the transaction monad, if I’ll ever really play around with Haskell. A third point is that I realized that I’m not keeping up with academic research in CS and, not having TAoCP, might never have been up to date at all. I’m following a few online references like LtU, but not closely and it’s pretty rare these days that I look deeply into some research paper. This is something else I should probably change, if time permits.


Page 1 of 1, totaling 1 entries