Coders at Work (Peter Seibel)

[jsburbidge]

 This book is a collection of interviews with prominent (at least within the programming community) software developers. Most of them are important figures in the development of languages and operating systems; one is Donald Knuth. All are people who have significant bodies of actual code to their names.

 

There's a bit of a selection bias - there are no C++ gurus and most of the interviewees are dubious about C++, and maybe more Lispers than there might be in a random sample[1] - but in general these are significant names with a wide range of types of background (IBM, minis, micros, a lot of PDP-11 people (largely a function of age)). Almost everyone did C at some point.

 

I find a few things interesting.

 

First, they clearly belong to an extended community of which I'm a part, in attitudes and shared assumptions. Despite this, in over twenty years in the development world in the financial sector, I've relatively rarely met anyone like them. (I can think of a few possible exceptions, but it's rare.) And I don't mean in skill - these people outdo me in skill - but in attitude and approach. They talk, over and over again, about the importance of a "spark", of enthusiasm and a real focus on the enjoyment of problem-solving while coding. In all the ways that I'm like them, they aren't very much like (most of} my colleagues.[2] 

 

They almost all use Emacs. In thirty years of being a developer. I've never met anyone else who was a committed Emacs user. Most have read Knuth to one degree or another, as well. (I read through the first three volumes, and have started making my way through the newer volumes in book 4.)

 

Many of them started out without formal training. In many cases, this was because they started in high school. In others, it's because programming was a hobby to them while they studied other disciplines, and then became a practical benefit when they started looking for work. (There are a few trained CS graduates and academics, products of or teachers of standard academic courses, with Knuth at one end of the spectrum and somebody like Thomson at the other.) The non-formally-trained ones still think like software engineers and not simply hackers, with concerns around process, design, and structure. Most of them started work with computers before the development of the current credentialist model creating a conveyor belt between university and the workplace; I managed to come in just at the tail end of when it was possible to become a mainstream developer with no formal certification if you could demonstrate skill.

 

For someone like me it's a bit like looking in a slightly distorting mirror and wondering what I might have been like if I'd gone to Waterloo[3] and done maths and CS rather than English and classics (with some math) at Trent. Certainly I'd have had a different spectrum of opportunities; most of my work has been maintaining and extending already-established systems.

Overall, though, I found it one of the better books I have read at conveying what the experience of software development is like. (There's Moran's The Big Boost, where he follows Trent the Uncatchable doing software development as part of a team, and a bit of Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky.)

 

[1] The author is a Lisp developer.

 

It's not surprising that people like Stroustrup weren't interviewed; his work has been in language design rather than extensive coding. The more notable omissions would include Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman. (Though there's discussion of Stallman, including by somebody who also worked on the original TECO Emacs.) C++ possibilities might have included Stephen Dewhurst, Herb Sutter, or Jim Coplien.

 

[2] Nobody else has ever said, in the Friday scrum, that it means two days before they could get back to coding on their current issues, rather than "Happy Friday".

 

[3] I didn't apply to Waterloo, but I got an (informal) offer from them anyway, when I came seventh on the Descartes in Canada.

 

Comments

[ionelv]

As I said, only 4 of the first 5 names looked iffy, and I will spell them out for clarity: Zawinski, Crockford, Eich and Bloch. The rest do give off better vibes and appear to have beefier creds. I especially liked Fran Allen's life story.