Coders at Work: Reflections of the Craft of Programming

Software developers are typically bright people but possess few social contacts who approach the world like them. Such loneliness is famously parodied by stereotypes. Even the most social among us have a difficult time relating to others what programming is like. In this work, Seibel provides interviews with 15 accomplished programmers and alleviates some of that alone-ness. In so doing, he explains to the English-speaking world how computer programming has grown and is currently practiced.

The interviewees compose a veritable who’s who of computer science – including, at the end, Donald Knuth, who is widely regarded as the best programmer of all time. Fran Allen, a widely recognized female programmer, is included. Some were educated show more well at Harvard or MIT. Others were, to a large degree, self-taught before the discipline of computer science was established. All convey a unique perspective about how they write code.

For the most part, Seibel asks each person a similar set of questions: about their background, formative experiences, approach to the craft of coding, and their approach to a new trend of literate programming. It’s amazing to see how wide the range of different opinions is! They all seem to disagree, especially about very important things. Providing room for (sometimes heated) disagreements is healthy for computer programmers who are smart but have few companions. After all, we must work together to accomplish work.

This is not a technical work. Neither code nor math is presented. It’s more of a biographical work of 16 different programmers. It spans the lanes of human interest and computer science. Non-programmers might be interested in learning how IT people work, but the obvious audience here consists of software developers. By grabbing big-name interviews, Seibel hits the sweet spot for this audience and knocks a homer out of the park.

In particular, expositions such as this allow people to see the history of computing. Readers get to see innovators, spanning back to the 1950s until the date of publication in 2009. These people changed the world such that a mini-computer resides in many people’s pockets in the developed world, in the form of a smart phone. They went from coding in assembly code to writing in higher-level languages to co-writing in more everyday language. That history of science will be of interest to readers in the future when future students seek to learn about the “old days” when computers were young. And we will have the writer Peter Seibel to thank. show less

I loved "Coders at work". It consists of in-depth interviews with 15 very accomplished and famous programmers. The author Peter Seibel has, in my opinion, done an outstanding job with these interviews.

First, he picked a stellar set of super star programmers to interview. Second, he asked very interesting questions, some of which only a fellow programmer would ask. Third, he asked several questions to all of his subjects, which allows the reader to compare and contrast the answers, while also asking questions about each programmer's special areas of interest.

To give you a sense of the questions he asked, here are some samples: "How do you design code?", "What is the worst bug you've ever had to track down?", "What's your preferred show more debugging techniques and tools? Print statements? Symbolic debuggers? Formal proofs?" and "As a programmer, do you consider yourself a scientist, an engineer, an artist, or a craftsman?". I think these are all excellent questions, and I learned a lot by reading all the different answers.

Each interview is on average 40 pages long (the whole book is about 600 pages), so it took me a while to read it, even though it was a pretty easy read. But this also means that there is room to ask a lot of questions. You can tell from the questions and follow-up questions that Peter Seibel is himself an experienced programmer. In addition, he seems very well read. He recognizes and comments on almost any book or research paper that is mentioned during the interviews. For example, Joshua Bloch mentioned the book Hacker's Delight, and Peter Seibel's comment is "that's the bit-twiddling book?".

Occasionally there are some pretty funny comments from Peter Seibel too. When Simon Peyton Jones talked about how he had not had a lot of experience with C , he ended by saying "... I never really spent several years writing big C programs. That's how you get some kind of deep, visceral feel and I never have". To which Peter Seibel replied "I think that feeling is usually revulsion".

While reading the book, I wondered whether I would get tired of the interviews by the end, but that did not happen. It kept being interesting till the end (and that's not just because Donald Knuth, arguably the most famous of them all, is last). For me, the most interesting interviews were the ones with Simon Peyton Jones and Peter Norvig. But even the least interesting interviews (for me that was the ones with L Peter Deutsch and Fran Allen) were still very good. In fact, even a single one of these interviews is worth the price of the book in my opinion.

There is also a historical quality to the book. The majority of the people interviewed started programming in the 50s or the early 60s. One of the standard questions was "How did you learn to program?" and I thought it was quite interesting to read about the old computers they used, the punch cards etc. It was almost like little history lessons from the computing field.

Almost as soon as I started reading this book, I grabbed a piece of paper and jotted down things of interest: concepts I hadn't heard about before, quotes, new languages to try, references to papers and blog posts, books that were recommended etc. When I got to the end, I had accumulated 6 full pages worth of notes. To me, that's an indication of the quality of the interviews, and of the value I got out of the book.

OK, one small complaint: it would have been nice with a picture of each of the interviewees, so we can see what they look like.

It is also worth mentioning that both Joe Armstrong and Simon Peyton Jones have been interviewed at Software Engineering Radio ([...]) - both those interviews were very good, definitely worth listening to. Also, Peter Seibel was interview about "Coders at work" by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky on the StackOverflow podcast (episode 69). And Peter Seibel has some interesting blog posts with excerpts from the book at his site [...] - check them out.

If you are seriously interested in programming, this is definitely one of the books you should read. Highly recommended. show less

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 (the author is a Lisp developer) - 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 worked in C at some point.

They clearly belong to an show more extended community (of which I'm a part) with a focus on coding as an interesting activity in itself rather than just a means to an end. In talking about hiring, the ones who discuss it almost all talk about looking for people with a "spark" rather than specific skills.

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 some trained CS graduates and academics, products of or teachers of standard academic courses.) 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.

Overall, I found it one of the better books I have read at conveying what the experience of software development is like. show less

very cool book. interesting to hear in their own words from some famous computer people. my favorite theme from the book was the ultimate importance of enthusiasm as an indicator of someone being good. enthusiasm is everything . also reassuring know that even some of these people who have done amazing things don't comment much and use print statements to debug. basically just do cool stuff that interests you always

I read this over several months, in 10-minute bursts on my daily T ride to work. I'd have bits and pieces of this rattling around in my head at work some days.

It was an odd feeling reading the experiences and thoughts of programmers who by and large came of age during a time where it was quite reasonable for a human to understand the entirety of what a computer was doing. We now work instead in a world of dizzying but invisible depth in technology; able to do amazing things, but no single human can comprehend the whole of it.

What felt missing to me, and why this is only 4 stars, was any attempt to pull the interviews together and synthesize something from them.
Instead, we get a book where, for example, N-1 coders are asked if they read Knuth right through, or use it for reference, or have not read it; and this is followed by Knuth basically demolishing the foundations of any conclusions you might be able to make from their answers, with a offhand comment that "I sometimes wonder if I can read them."

Anyway, this book was a much happier book for me than Beautiful Code. The interview style does mean that you feel you get to know most of the participants, and there is plenty of humbling and inspirational stuff, lots of interesting history, as well as lots of show more places where these big names show they're only human too -- for example, coder after coder fesses up to using print statements for debugging.

Seibel got access to a great set of people, gave some quite good interviews where he managed some impressive followup questions on a wide and historically deep set of topics, and somehow got it to all hold together. Well done. show less

Expected to love it, but found it hard going

I started coding around the same time as a lot of these folks, so it resonated, but it wasn't as engaging as I hoped it would be.
Most of the content felt like a history lesson rather than anything actionable for coding today.
I pushed through but not sure I should have.