Coders at Work Reflections on the Craft of Programming

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

1. Frances Allen Pioneer in optimizing compilers. First woman to win Turing Award (2006) and first woman IBM fellow. 2. Joe Armstrong Inventor of Erlang. 3. Joshua Bloch Author of Java collections framework. Now at Google. 4. Bernie Cosell One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMP’s and a master debugger. 5. Douglas Crockford JSON founder, JavaScript Architect at Yahoo! 6. L. Peter Deutsch Author of Ghostscript, Implemented Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1. 7. Brad Fitzpatrick Wrote LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, Perlbal. 8. Anders Hejlsberg Lead architect of C#, Architect of Delphi at Borland. Wrote what became Turbo Pascal. 9. Dan Ingalls Smalltalk implementor and designer. 10. Simon Peyton Jones Co-inventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler. 11. Donald Knuth Author of The Art of Computer Programming and TeX. 12. Peter Norvig Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI. 13. Guy Steele Co-inventor ofScheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five. Currently working on Fortress. 14. Ken Thompson Inventor of UNIX. 15. Jamie Zawinski Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker.

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.