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Comments: 207 +- Book Reviews: Coders At Work on Wednesday September 02, @01:00PM
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samzenpus
on Wednesday September 02, @01:00PM
from the read-all-about-it dept.
from the read-all-about-it dept.
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bookreview
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.
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.
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Microserfs (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Microserfs (Score:5, Informative)
Nah, Death March by Yourdon. I re-read it frequently and it never loses its luster.
Parent
Re:Microserfs (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Microserfs (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Women's issues in computing workplace (Score:5, Funny)
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:Women's issues in computing workplace (Score:5, Funny)
Curious: What employer asked/required you to work topless? ...and where might I submit my application?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
My powers of repression and selective memory are pretty impressive. I've seen goatse, and still manage to live a pretty good semblance of a normal life.
Re: (Score:2)
women have *never* felt comfortable working topless.
But I thought it helps you concentrate when we can see your bewbs O.o
Re: (Score:2)
I'll grunt to that.
Now where are the topless pics?
Coding philosophy book: Writing Solid Code (1993) (Score:4, Informative)
I found Writing Solid Code [amazon.com] (Maguire, 1993) worth the read. Sure, some of what's in there is dated but many of the concepts are timeless and part of today's conventional wisdom.
Things like coding for security, coding for readability/maintenance, etc. etc.
Granted, those concepts weren't new in 1993 either, but many in the generation of programmers that cut their teeth on Turbo Pascal and 8-bit-machine BASIC never learned the lessons from 1960s mainframe code jockeys.
Useless book. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Who the hell are you?
Re:Useless book. (Score:5, Funny)
Judging from the construction of his statement*, not Steven Colbert. That narrows it down a bit.
*My evidence? The use of the "or" conjunction, which in English is semantically equivalent to a logical XOR.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
*My evidence? The use of the "or" conjunction, which in English is semantically equivalent to a logical XOR.
That would only narrow it down if Steven Colbert actually WAS mentioned in the book. Anyone got the book to check it out?
Does this complement "Code Complete" (Score:2, Interesting)
How does the info in this book compare to Code Complete (2)?
Andy Hertzfeld... (Score:2)
... is not interviewed.
WTF?
ah yes, anti-perl tirades are refreshing (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, it must be refreshing all right, listening to aging Computer "Scientists" reciting crap that's been stale for years. It certainly is courageous for an ACM member to continue the smear campaign against perl. His friends in the gentleman's club wi
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In general, I agree with you. To nitpick, though...
Proving things is the domain of math, not science. In science, you can only find models which aren't disproven in a particular domain or by the body of experimental data. You can't prove your model is correct.
And the only reason you can do it in math is because you get to choose the assumptions and assume they're absolutely true.
Re: (Score:2)
I was looking forward to reading this book based on the thread above. But you're right, Peter Deutsch's comment about perl is less refeshing than asinine. I'd love to see a thoughtful analysis of perl compared to other languages, because sometimes, even though it's the language I use most frequently, it drives me nuts. But calling it 'an abomination' doesn't quite qualify as thoughtful analysis. And it certainly doesn't consider that it must be doing something right to still be used in so much functioning c
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If the popularity of a programming language were a sign of it being a "good" language, then how come there is so much COBOL and FORTRAN? This reminds me of an old saying: "Eat shit, 10 billion flies can't be wrong!" I'd also like to point out that most programmers are hacks. I don't doubt that languages like Perl are useful for small scripts but I think it is not a language that scales up very well. Google for example uses C++ and Python and they try really hard to hire only the best programmers they ca
Re:ah yes, anti-perl tirades are refreshing (Score:5, Insightful)
I come from a physics background and most physicists used to, and may still, program in FORTRAN, yet FORTRAN is a terrible programming language.
They use Fortran because the language is designed and optimized to be the best language at what physicists and other physical scientists most often need it do: crunch a whole lot of numbers. I wouldn't use Fortran to make a word processor or web browser, but if you need a program to spend two weeks doing a lot of math, you just can't beat it.
Parent
Re:ah yes, anti-perl tirades are refreshing (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:ah yes, anti-perl tirades are refreshing (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing is, from an application standpoint, I wouldn't consider perl a programming language. To me, it's an advanced scripting langauge. And it does that really, really well. But as a programming language, it isn't exactly the best.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You might think that the obvious utility of perl, the fact that perl and perl derived languages remain tremendously popular with people writing actual code, might blunt the man's opinion that it's an "abomination".
Excuse me, but why can't it be both? It's nasty, but it works for a lot of things. That said, python does what perl does with easier syntax, so I'll be using that.
Socially relevent (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFS: "In her interview, Fran Allen makes an interesting assertion â" programming and computer science need to become more socially relevant."
How do you recognize the extroverted programmer? He's the one staring at *your* shoes.
Same goes for engineers. Name a well-known (outside of engineering) engineer. I'll wait ...
Since programming involves long hours alone staring at a computer screen, it's no surprise it tends to attract people who don't mind or even enjoy being alone, and for whom self-promotion is fairly low on the to-do list.
Re:Socially relevent (Score:5, Interesting)
Same goes for engineers. Name a well-known ... engineer. I'll wait ...
Rowan Atkinson has a Master's in Electrical Engineering.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
He's not a well-known engineer.
He's a well-known actor/comedian that happens to have studied electrical engineering.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (president of Iran), who has a doctorate in civil engineering and traffic transportation planning.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Same goes for engineers. Name a well-known (outside of engineering) engineer. I'll wait ...
Imhotep - Ancient Egypt.
Leonardo DaVinci - Renaissance
David Fisher - Present (Dynamic rotating tower thing).
Come on now, You can't clump Engineers into the same group as computer scientists, they've been around for ages.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
How about Hu Jintao, Paramount Leader of China, not to mention hydraulic engineer? I think there may be a few people in China who have heard of him.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And what exactly did Jimmy do in the field of nuclear engineering?
Jimmy Carter?
He was one of Americas first *ever* naval nuclear engineers wasn't he?
Biggest Gripe about coding .. shouldn't be coders (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm disguted, repeatedly, at what passes for applications these days. Back when I started we wrote tight, purposeful code and optimised for speed or size. But now I'm constantly encountering untested code, applications which have the most bombastic interfaces, layouts which seem more ad hoc than well planned and a dozen other gripes.
Can't be all the coders faults. Whatever happened to Q/A? Whatever happened to analysts who have a clue? I keep seeing people who have no background in IT making decisions and overruling experince wiht seat of the pants decisions. Even to the point of corrupting data and having no fall-back plan.
I feel I need to retire, but I'm many, many years from that.
I'd like a book which discusses the EPIC FAIL of present day standards and practices of software development.
Re:Biggest Gripe about coding .. shouldn't be code (Score:4, Funny)
I'm disguted, repeatedly. . .
Sounds painful. Hope you get over it soon.
Parent
Re:Biggest Gripe about coding .. shouldn't be code (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
"Agile" happened. (Score:5, Interesting)
Whatever happened to Q/A? Whatever happened to analysts who have a clue?
"Agile programming" happened. No need to figure out the requirements up front, they're going to change anyway. No need to architect the system, we'll just use a "framework" and add features.
This works OK for web sites in PHP, but don't try to do hard real time or database internals or secure software that way. Agile programming will give you a set of loosely coupled features, but for many user-facing applications, that's good enough.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I hear you. I remember when, back on my Apple II+, I could write new music on my sequencer (with fully sampled orchestral sounds - no external hardware needed), download new mp3s from Amazon.com, and chat in real-time with some friends, all at the same time. I remember how easy it was to stream real-time video wirelessly to my TV. Programming interfaces was a snap as well, with fully-featured APIs available for several different flavors of operating systems.
I remember how just about any information you c
Slashdot (Score:2)
Do good coders read Slashdot during company time?
(Like me and you)
Programmers at Work (1989) (Score:5, Informative)
Another similar book that is no longer in print is the semi-classic, Programmers at Work [amazon.com] subtitled Interviews With 19 Programmers Who Shaped the Computer Industry, (1986 /1989) by Susan Lammers [wordpress.com] which includes interviews with well-known or pioneer programmers such as Charles Simonyi (Microsoft), Bill Gates, Gary Kildall (Intergalactic Digital Research), Andy Hertzfield (Macintosh Operating System), John Warnock (Postscript) and C. Wayne Ratcliff (dBASE).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Simonyi is to blame for Hungarian notation. Sure, it turned into the opposite of all his recomendations, but he's still the mad scientist who created that monster.
"Brilliant Programmers" (Score:3, Interesting)
I have mixed feelings towards the people cited as "all-time great programmers and computer scientists", at least the ones I know anything about.
Ken Thompson. The one, absolute no-brainer for inclusion, because he's the most influential programmer ever, without exception. His minimalistic approach to OS design and API specification has had a profound effect on how people think software platforms. I started to study programming before Unix became widely used, and the sheer baroqueness of pre-Unix OS's is far beyond what younger programmers can imagine. Even if you've never read anything this guy has written, you've been influenced by his ideas. We all owe him big time.
Donald Knuth. His contributions are pretty major. But the paradigms he uses to talk about programming are thoroughly obsolete. And I do not understand his obsession with finishing an unfinishable book.
Josh Bloch. I've had the pleasure of actually working with him. Brilliant dude, and certainly someone all programmers should listen to. (And he doesn't get enough credit for his contributions to the design of Java.) But calling him a programmer is a bit like calling Frank Lloyd Wright a "builder".
Jamie Zawinski. I don't know that much about the guy, but what I do know makes me unwilling to accept his opinion on anything. I'm informed mainly by the config files for early versions of Netscape Navigator. JWZ's comments in these files were the only documentation I could find for making the browser work with PC keyboards under Linux. These were short of useful information and long on rants about the supposed shortcomings of various hardware vendors. These would have been stupid and unprofessional, even if they hadn't been arrogant and poorly informed. (No Jamie, Alt and Meta are not the same thing.) And isn't his main claim to fame his contribution to the Netscape code base? Most of which was simply abandoned as unmaintainable when NS's projects got taken over by Mozilla and Sun.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
by "work" they must mean reading slashdot all day.
Re:Coders that work? (Score:4, Insightful)
So, instead of writing a narrowly focused technical book, they wrote a narrowly focused technical book?
Parent
No offence (Score:2)
But why don't you convince your local library to buy the book? They will thank you for your recommendation.
Re:Why Donald Knuth? (Score:5, Informative)
That guy is a relic of another age, and certainly not a coder; he's purely an academic in theoretical computer science.
He's good at making algorithms, but certainly not at coding.
You're ignorant. Have you ever used TeX or METAFONT? Knuth wrote them. The CWEB compiler? Knuth again. How about the MMIX simulator and assembler for MMIX architecture that Knuth designed to go along with TAOCP? Yep, Knuth. Want some more? See:
http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~uno/programs.html [stanford.edu]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Interestingly, I do wonder how Knuth would be rated in these days of massive (have you seen Java recently?) APIs, agile, test-driven development ? One thing that seems in common with all these guys is that they have written code which is of the old-school low-level infrastructural variety. His algorithm code is awesome, but a little spartan on the variable naming conventions. This is coming from someone who has an autographed set of TaoCP (and attended his occasional rare seminars).
Does the book actually ha
The Well of Uncomfortable Truths (Score:5, Insightful)
LOL. From my perspective, all computer programming languages are abominations [blogspot.com]. They are ancient primitive relics of what I call the Babbage and Lovelace era. They should all be placed in the Smithsonian right next to the buggy whip and the slide rule. I live for the day when a constitutional amendment is passed to ban them all. :-D
So your solution is a concurrent language using diagrams in place of syntax?
I'm not about to tell you the COSA approach is a bad idea, and I'd hate to discourage someone who's obviously got a lot of interest in making a system that really is better... But I have my doubts about visual programming languages in general. Mainly because it bypasses the established mechanisms humans have developed for conveying complex ideas (i.e. writing) in favor of visual diagrams - you lose the capability to convey a large volume of information effectively in a reasonably small space - or at least it seems you would. At any rate I can't figure out how those node graphs work...
And your statements about reliability? In what sense can a logic circuit be "guaranteed" free of defects? Did Intel know about this method of quality assurance back when they were designing the Pentium? It seems to me that simple logic circuits can be guaranteed free of defects because the human mind can readily model the whole system and intuitively decide it is correct. When the system is complex, that is no longer true.
I donâ(TM)t want to know about how to implement loops, tree structures, search algorithms and all that other jazz. If I want my program to save an audio recording to a file, I donâ(TM)t want to learn about frequency ranges, formats, fidelity, file library interface, audio library interface and so forth. This stuff really gets in the way.
It seems as though you've just said you want someone else to solve your problems for you.
To a certain extent this is quite reasonable. If you want to save an audio recording, it's reasonable to expect someone else to have come up with a program that will make it easy for you. This is why we have "sound recorder" applications and the like.
But what if you're the first person to write such a program? Or what if, for whatever reason (i.e. licensing issues, etc.) you can't use the work that's already been done? Then it seems to me that there's no way around it: you simply must understand about audio formats and deal with them on their own terms.
Likewise, suppose you want a program that can calculate a route to drive from Baltimore to Chicago. Of course it's been done: you can go ask Google for the route... But what if you want your own program that does this? Like if you wanted to compete with Google and get in the computer-map business? Then you'd need one of those pesky algorithms to turn that big pile of data into a usable route. The problem's not practically solvable unless you approach it with the right kind of strategy, that's exactly what an algorithm is. It's not practical to expect that all the problems in the world have already been solved by whoever created your language toolkit - if it were, then I'd be out of a job.
Parent
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How would you handle loops or complicated algorithms with many conditional paths in such a language? Languages are designed to solve practical problems, not to just to look pretty.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Real software developers code. Sure, they do other important work as well, but code is the work product. Every single person I've ever worked with who denied this was a crap coder who could write a clear design doc (but great at PowerPoint, or Project, or other busywork).