Coders at Work (Review)

Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming, by Peter Seibel. ISBN 978-1-4302-1948-4.

Peter Seibel interviews 15 programmers on a variety of topics. I liked the interviewing style: he asks a little biographical information,  sprinkles in some standard questions (How do you debug? How do you recommend people learn about programming? What’s a memorable bug you fixed? etc), and also lets the conversation go where it naturally wants to. Seibel describes himself modestly as a “writer turned programmer or a programmer turned writer”, but his questions reveal deep understanding of programming, and the next question he asks is often the follow-up I wanted.

The interviewees are Jamie Zawinski, Brad Fitzpatrick, Douglas Crawford, Brendan Each, Joshua Bloch, Joe Armstrong, Simon Peyton-Jones, Peter Norvig, Guy Steele, Dan Ingalls, L. Peter Deutsch, Ken Thompson, Fran Allen, Bernie Cosell, and Donald Knuth.

Coders at Work