ewx | Coders At Work (Reply)

Coders At Work, Peter Seibel, ISBN 987-1-4302-1948-4

This is a collection of interviews with well known and successful programmers. Many of the names were already familiar to me (Knuth, Thompson, Zawinski, …) but others were new to me - though given the descriptions of their achievements, they are by no means out of place.

Seibel has a few standard questions for everyone: how did you get learn programming, have you ever tried literate programming (mostly they haven’t), etc, but knows the field and his subjects well enough to tailor each interview to its subject. By the same token, although there is a good chunk of non-technical discussion in here, the reader will inevitably need to have some familiarity with programming to get the most out of the book.

Some of the same answers come up repeatedly too; many got started long before the microcomputer era, so did not have access to computers at home. Some were at schools lucky enough to have a computer (“It turns out that T. Vincent Learson had arranged for an IBM 1130 minicomputer to be in the basement of the Boston Latin School”); other subjects had access through some a local council or university, despite only being schoolchildren at the time.

There’s a lot of history in here; Ken Thompson discussing the origins of Unix, for instance, or Guy Steele on the evolution of Emacs from TECO. Some of this stuff is already well document but even so I suspect the book will make a good resource for historians of the computer world.

Attitudes to programming as a craft are discussed: the merits or otherwise of various tools and techniques. Some synthesis would perhaps have been justified here: how do the arguments of the subjects stack up against each other?

Worth a read if you are interested in the field and its practitioners.