Coders at Work - Peter Seibel - 2021 (Technology) [Audiobook] (miok)

Coders at Work - Peter Seibel - 2021
Reflections on the Craft of Programming



By: Peter Seibel
Narrated by: Mitchell Dorian, full cast
Length: 20 hrs and 52 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Release date: 04-21-21
Language: English
Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Professionals & Academics
Publisher: Upfront Books
Format: mp3 64/48 stereo



Peter Seibel interviews 15 of the most interesting computer programmers alive today in Coders at Work, offering a companion volume to Apress’ 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: 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

Some highlights:

“I write a lot of programs and I can’t claim to be typical but I can claim that I get a lot of them working for a large variety of things and I would find it harder if I had to spend all my time learning how to use somebody else’s routines. It’s much easier for me to learn a few basic concepts and then reuse code by text-editing the code that previously worked.” —Donald Knuth

“The problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.”—Joe Armstrong

“When I was 30, 35 years old, I knew, in a deep sense, every line of code I ever wrote. I’d write a program during the day, and at night I’d sit there and walk through it line by line and find bugs. I’d go back the next day and, sure enough, it would be wrong.” —Ken Thompson

“I think one of the most important things, for me anyway, when building something from the ground up like that is, as quickly as possible, getting the program to a state that you, the programmer, can use it. Even a little bit. Because that tells you where to go next in a really visceral way.” —Jamie Zawinski

“I think we’ve got people now who are just as smart as the people we had 30 years ago and they are being pushed to the limits of their abilities as people were 30 years ago. But the difference is that it’s not possible to understand everything that’s going on anymore.” —Guy Steele

“By the time I graduated there actually was a computer-science department, but I stuck with math as my major. It felt like doing all the requirements for a computer-science major was like majoring in IBM.”—Peter Norvig

“When the limestone of imperative programming is worn away, the granite of functional programming will be observed.”—Simon Peyton Jones

About the author:

Peter Seibel is either a writer turned programmer or programmer turned writer. After picking up an undergraduate degree in English from Yale 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. In 2003 he quit his job as the architect of a Java-based transactional messaging system, planning to hack Lisp for a year. Instead he ended up spending two years writing the Jolt Productivity Award–winning Practical Common Lisp. Since then he's been working as chief monkey at Gigamonkeys Consulting, working on Coders at Work, learning to train chickens, practicing Tai Chi, and being a dad. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife Lily, daughter Amelia, and dog Mahlanie.

©2009 Peter Seibel (P)2021 Upfront Books

Reviews:

“Absolutely amazing! A page turner, just like Harry Potter for the technically minded.” —Tobias Svensson from review at return 42;

“This book is so interesting I did 60 minutes on the treadmill yesterday instead of the usual 30 because I couldn’t stop reading.” —Joel Spolsky on Joel on Software

“Coders at Work should inspire readers to learn about the wider context of their craft and stop the reinvention of the proverbial wheel” —Vladimir Sedach from review at Slashdot

“Peter Seibel asks the sort of questions only a fellow programmer would ask. Reading this book may be the next best thing to chatting with these illustrious programmers in person.” —Ehud Lamm, Founder of Lambda the Ultimate - the programming languages weblog





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