Coders At Work

I finished reading Peter Seibel's Coders At Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming yesterday. I thought it was terrific and would recommend it highly to anyone who writes code for a living. It's an impressive follow-up to his Practical Common Lisp.

Peter drew his inspiration from the Paris Review Writers At Work. Great creativity is required to recognize an idea that's good in one context and reuse it in another.

The roster of interviewees is impressive, especially after having read the book. I only knew a minority when I opened the book. Only Knuth and Ken Thompson were long-familiar names. I knew of JWZ by hearsay. I have a copy of Peter Norvig's "AI: A Modern Approach", it's been over my head forever.

Donald Knuth is the biggest name; Peter holds him back for the last chapter. He seemed to me to be from another planet. I've written about my love of LaTeX; this is the man who spent ten years of his life coming up with TeX. I especially liked this bit on page 598:

With TeX I was interacting with hundreds of years of human history and I didn't want to throw out all of the things that book designers have learned over the centuries and start anew and say, "Well, forget that guys; you now, we're going to be logical now."

The more I learn about Peter Norvig, the more impressed I am. The people who are exposed to his genius at Google are fortunate indeed.

Guy Steele didn't disappoint. He's brilliant, but he can't help working the fact that he went to MIT into the very first answer he gives. My informal survey tells me that this is true of each and every MIT graduate I've ever known personally - except for one. (My friend is one of the most brilliant, most accomplished people I know, but I didn't hear that his Ph.D. came from MIT until after I'd known him for a long time, until I heard it from a mutual friend.) Thank you for another data point, Guy.

Some of these folks are younger than I am, but most are my contemporaries. All are far more accomplished as programmers and computer scientists than I am. They were doing their best work in this field when I was a mechanical engineer. I'm doing my best to try and catch up, but I still have a very long way to go. I envy them their accomplishments.

It seems to me that Peter Seibel struck a very nice balance between scripting his questions and letting the conversation lead him. There was a thread of common questions that ran through all the interviews (e.g., "How do you debug?", "Do you read code?", "Do you consider yourself a scientist, engineer, craftsman, or artist?", "How much math is needed to be a good programmer?"), but each interviewee contributed special insights that would have been hard to anticipate.

The book brought home two things to me: how much computing has changed since these people were in their heydays and how much wonderful stuff is being lost to time. I haven't read "The Art of Computer Programming". I feel like I should, but I'm not sure that it'll provide a payoff for all that effort in the corporate enterprise computing world in which I earn my living today. Those with the talent and good fortune to be working for Google and firms that value deep knowledge are a minority.

Every one of the individuals interviewed by Peter Seibel is a giant in the field. Is that so because they did their best work early in the history of computer science? If 2% of people are wired to be programmers, and there are 6.67 billion people on earth, that means there are about 133,400,000 potential writers of C#, Java, Cobol, Lisp, or what have you. Will we find giants to compare to the early ones?

I've read that Shakespeare and Babe Ruth stood out in their fields because there were comparatively fewer contemporaries who were their equals. Now that we have everyone blogging on the Internet and full-time professional athletes it's harder to stand out.

Programming is often compared to building buildings or manufacturing widgets or god knows what else. Like these other productive activities, it's often outsourced by American firms to be done by individuals in parts of the world that will do it for far less than their domestic counterparts. Will the next generation of great achievers come from their ranks? Will Peter Seibel have to travel further afield to hear about their exploits?

I enjoyed the book very much and recommend it highly.