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Peter Seibel
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Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming 1st ed. Edition, Kindle Edition

by Peter Seibel (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 281 ratings
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Peter Seibel interviews 15 of the most interesting computer programmers alive today in Coders at Work, offering a companion volume to Apress’s highly acclaimed best-seller Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. As the words “at work” suggest, Peter Seibel focuses on how his interviewees tackle the day-to-day work of programming, while revealing much more, like how they became great programmers, how they recognize programming talent in others, and what kinds of problems they find most interesting.

Hundreds of people have suggested names of programmers to interview on the Coders at Work web site: www.codersatwork.com. The complete list was 284 names. Having digested everyone’s feedback, we selected 15 folks who’ve been kind enough to agree to be interviewed:

  • Frances Allen: Pioneer in optimizing compilers, first woman to win the Turing Award (2006) and first female IBM fellow
  • Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang
  • Joshua Bloch: Author of the Java collections framework, now at Google
  • Bernie Cosell: One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMPs and a master debugger
  • Douglas Crockford: JSON founder, JavaScript architect at Yahoo!
  • L. Peter Deutsch: Author of Ghostscript, implementer of Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1
  • Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation
  • Brad Fitzpatrick: Writer of LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, and Perlbal
  • Dan Ingalls: Smalltalk implementor and designer
  • Simon Peyton Jones: Coinventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler
  • Donald Knuth: Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX
  • Peter Norvig: Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI
  • Guy Steele: Coinventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five, currently working on Fortress
  • Ken Thompson: Inventor of UNIX
  • Jamie Zawinski: Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker
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  1. ISBN-13
    978-1430219484
  2. Edition
    1st ed.
  3. Publisher
    Apress
  4. Publication date
    21 December 2009
  5. Language
    English
  6. File size
    2.0 MB
  7. See all details
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Product description

About the Author

Peter Seibel is a serious developer of long standing. In the early days of the Web, he hacked Perl for Mother Jones and Organic Online. He participated in the Java revolution as an early employee at WebLogic which, after its acquisition by BEA, became the cornerstone of the latter's rapid growth in the J2EE sphere. He has also taught Java programming at UC Berkeley Extension. He is the author of Practical Common LISP from Apress.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00ACC2536
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Apress; 1st ed. edition (21 December 2009)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2.0 MB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 634 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1430219483
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 281 ratings

About the author

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Peter Seibel

Peter Seibel

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Peter Seibel is either a writer turned programmer or programmer turned writer. After picking up an undergraduate degree in English and working briefly as a journalist, he was seduced by the web. In the early '90s he hacked Perl for Mother Jones magazine and Organic Online. He participated in the Java revolution as an early employee at WebLogic and later taught Java programming at UC Berkeley Extension. Peter is also one of the few second-generation Lisp programmers on the planet and was a childhood shareholder in Symbolics, Inc.

In 2003 he quit his job as the architect of a Java-based transactional messaging system to hack Lisp for a year. Instead he ended up spending two years writing a book, the Jolt Productivity Award winning Practical Common Lisp. His most recent book is Coders at Work, a collection of Q&A interviews with fifteen notable programmers and computer scientists.

When not writing books and programming computers Peter enjoys practicing tai chi. He live in Berkeley, California, with his wife Lily, daughters Amelia and Tabitha, and their dog Mahlanie.

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  • Roman Seidelsohn
    5.0 out of 5 stars Unterhaltsames und inspirierendes Werk
    Reviewed in Germany on 21 February 2023
    Verified Purchase
    Die Interviews sind von spätestens 2009 und zahlreiche Themen sind für mich unverständlich, dennoch liest sich das Buch für einen Entwickler wie Prosa, macht richtig Spaß und ist sehr inspirierend.
    Ich kann es nur empfehlen. Die Interviews sind abwechslungsreich und sehr gut geführt und man lernt durchauch auch von der jahrzehntelangen Erfahrung der "alten Hasen".
    Für Entwickler eine unbedingte Leseempfehlung.
    Report
  • Scott J. Pearson
    5.0 out of 5 stars Human interest about computer programming - a winning combination
    Reviewed in the United States on 26 November 2020
    Verified Purchase
    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 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.
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  • anish
    4.0 out of 5 stars Must read
    Reviewed in India on 25 January 2019
    Verified Purchase
    Must read
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  • ARMSTRONG
    5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome book it's must read
    Reviewed in Italy on 17 February 2018
    Verified Purchase
    Awesome book really enjoying reading it at the moment.. I would recommend this book to anyone in the computer science field o anyone interested how the great minds of the I. T WORLD STARTED OUT
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  • Poupon philippe
    5.0 out of 5 stars Trés interresant
    Reviewed in France on 30 November 2016
    Verified Purchase
    Ce n'est pas un livre de programmation, ce sont des développeurs reconnu qui explique leur parcours professionnel, leur façon de travailler, leurs méthodes, leur motivation ...
    Très intéressant, je suis un vieux développeur et cela m'a conforté dans plusieurs de mes positions et de mes pratiques, de voir tout ces avis de figure connu de l'art du développement.
    Cela remet en perspective beaucoup de chose à la mode aujourd'hui !
    Report

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