Woop! Just what I need!

As Founders at Work has been mentioned, I will chip in with Coders at Work, which is brilliant and inspired by FaW - it includes many of the OGs of programming: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Progr...

At Apple? Maybe not. But elsewhere?

Maybe no articles written about them but books or chapters ([0], [1]) written by them.

In the spotlight? You betcha, i think watching talks by Brian Cantrill is highly entertaining. Rich Rickeys' talks are highly regarded on HN (making a mental note to watch them). Carmack talking at Quakecon for hours about many different things.

(edit) formatting and links

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Program...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Masterminds-Programming-Conversations...

Yeah I wondered about the origin too. One thing I did during quarantine was re-read some old books on my bookshelf, including 2009's Coders at Work:

https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Program...

The Brendan Eich interview was really interesting, because it talked about bridging research and software engineering, specifically with regard to memory safety in C++ and debugging tools.

I think he was talking about manual annotations on C++. It seems clear that this interest morphed into sponsoring of Rust. I think Rust was a side project since 2006 and it was "announced" around 2010 (?).

And Mozilla also sponsored the "rr" reversible Debugger, which is also some very impressive engineering. (Sadly it seems to get less attention than Rust!)

Anyway, for PL nerds, I recommend reading this interview.

----

I think this work on software engineering tools is great, but as a Firefox user of 15+ years, it would be hard for me to argue that Firefox received sufficient attention. It does feel like the situation where the engineers work on the tools for too long and then management cancels both projects (which I've seen happen in my career).

It's about even more than that: it's about the complexity.

There's an inherent complexity in the problem being solved.

And there is an "accidental complexity" in the implementation of the solution.

Throwing away everything, people typically believe that they can avoid handling a lot of the "inherent complexity." But typically there is a good reason why the inherent complexity was addressed in the previous version of the program, and there's a big chance that the new "from the scratch" designers will have to relearn and rediscover all that, instead of transforming the already existing knowledge that is encoded in the previous version.

For anybody interested in the topic, I recommend the number of case studies presented in:

https://www.amazon.com/Search-Stupidity-Twenty-Marketing-Dis...

"In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters"

See about new rewrite of Wordstar simply not having the printer drivers that the previous had, and also other features people already expected, leading to Wordstar's demise.

Or what Zawinski's names "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" (search the internet for that, the link here wouldn't work!)

"I'm so totally impressed at this Way New Development Paradigm. Let's call it the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model, or "CADT" for short."

"It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?"

Or an interview with Jamie Zawinski from Siebel's "Coders at Work."

https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Program...

... "even phrasing it that way makes it sounds like there’s someone who’s actually in charge making that decision, which isn’t true at all. All of this stuff just sort of happens. And one of the things that happens is everything get rewritten all the time and nothing’s ever finished. If you’re one of those developers, that’s fine because there’s always something to play around with if your hobby is messing around with your computer rather than it being a means to an end — being a tool you use to get whatever you’re actually interested in done."

If one is able to cover all the complexity, and it is not destructive to the goal, the rewrite is OK. Otherwise, one should be critical to the ideas of rewrites as they could be potentially secretly motivated by simple (jwz again): "rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha)"

It’s just shameful. The author is also trying to sell their insight. It’s just so shameful all around.

If you are a new programmer, grab Coders at Work (and when I say new, I mean you have less than five years of full time professional work experience, paycheck and everything.). It’s just interviews with notable programmers and it’s a great way to learn about how different everyone really is, why they like a particular language/technology, where they got their start, and a little bit about their process. It’s a not a how-to, and you’ll get more out of it.

https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Program...

Yes. The article is a bit tautological. It's not defining seniority in terms of time spent. He actually says this at the end. Instead he's defining a "senior developer" as someone who has a necessary mix of the qualities he talks about. It would be more accurate to say "These are the traits your manager will tell you to develop to get promoted."

Personally, my favorite book about old coders is Coders At Work (https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Program...). It's a bunch of interviews with programmers who have created programming languages and lots of the fundamental software we all rely on. It showed me what the journey to being a great programmer can look like.

To me, senior is a corporate term. Great programmers build great things. Senior developers get promoted. I sometimes ask young programmers this: Do you care about the craft or the career? I think being a great programmer will make a person money. There aren't that many truly great programmers. But if they're impatient or they don't think they can be great, they can probably be senior.

Becoming senior is easy: Just help your boss accomplish their goals. Pay attention and develop skills that will help you do this no matter where you are and what you're working on. If you over-specialize in a specific organization or person's need, you become the expert beginner and you can't leave or you will struggle.

Some of the things that help a person be senior can also make them great. But the path to being great is a very different and personal one (at least that's the impression I got from Coders At Work. I make no claims for myself.) Jeff Dean is undoubtedly a great programmer and was also the most senior developer at Google for a long time. They made new levels just for him. So they can overlap. If someone is lucky and their job is great, the things that make them senior can also make them great. If their job sucks and management is terrible, they'll have to choose every day between doing something great or doing something to get promoted (being senior.)

My favorite article on the journey of a software engineer is this one: https://medium.com/@webseanhickey/the-evolution-of-a-softwar... . To me it's the story of someone who started off trying to be senior but then started to become great.

All the guys from "Coders at work" [1]: - Jamie Zawinski - Brad Fitzpatrick - Douglas Crockford - Brendan Eich - Joshua Bloch - Joe Armstrong - Symon Peyton Jones - Peter Norvig - Guy Steele - Dan Ingalls - L Peter Deutsch - Ken Thompson - Fran Allen - Bernie Cossel - Donald Knuth [1] https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Program...

You might enjoy Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution[1]. It's not too focused on specific people or companies, although you'll encounter some well known people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Richard Stallman in the book. It's an interesting read because it gives you a great background that helps you understand how we ended up with the tech culture and environment we have today.

In the reply to another comment, I also mentioned Coders at Work[2]. I found that it provided some great insight into the early days of some fascinating companies from a technical perspective.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Le... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Program...

I've gathered all the book titles in this thread and created Amazon affiliate links (if you don't mind. Otherwise you still have all the titles together :-) )

A Pattern Language, Alexander and Ishikawa and Silverstein http://amzn.to/2s9aSSc

Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment , Stevens http://amzn.to/2qPOMjN

Algorithmics: the Spirit of Computing, Harel http://amzn.to/2rW5FNS

Applied Crytography, Wiley http://amzn.to/2rsULxS

Clean Code, Martin http://amzn.to/2sIOWtQ

Clean Coder, Martin http://amzn.to/2rWgbEP

Code Complete, McConnel http://amzn.to/2qSUIwE

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, Petzold http://amzn.to/2rWfR9d

Coders at Work, Seibel http://amzn.to/2qPCasZ

Compilers: Principles, Techniques, & Tools, Aho http://amzn.to/2rCSUVA

Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective, O'Hallaron and Bryant http://amzn.to/2qPY5jH

Data Flow Analysis: Theory and Practice, Khedker http://amzn.to/2qTnSvr

Dependency Injection in .NET, Seemann http://amzn.to/2rCz0tV

Domain Driven Design, Evans http://amzn.to/2sIGM4N

Fundamentals of Wireless Communication, Tse and Viswanath http://amzn.to/2rCTmTM

Genetic Programming: An Intrduction, Banzhaf http://amzn.to/2s9sdut

Head First Design Patterns, O'Reilly http://amzn.to/2rCISUB

Implementing Domain-Driven Design, Vernon http://amzn.to/2qQ2G5u

Intrduction to Algorithms, CLRS http://amzn.to/2qXmSBU

Introduction to General Systems Thinking, Weinberg http://amzn.to/2qTuGJw

Joy of Clojure, Fogus and Houser http://amzn.to/2qPL4qr

Let over Lambda, Hoyte http://amzn.to/2rWljcp

Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, Tanenbaum http://amzn.to/2rKudsw

Parsing Techniques, Grune and Jacobs http://amzn.to/2rKNXfn

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, DeMarco and Lister http://amzn.to/2qTu86F

Programming Pearls, Bentley http://amzn.to/2sIRPe9

Software Process Design: Out of the Tar Pit, McGraw-Hill http://amzn.to/2rVX0v0

Software Runaways, Glass http://amzn.to/2qT2mHn

Sorting and Searching, Knuth http://amzn.to/2qQ4NWQ

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Abelson and Sussman http://amzn.to/2qTflsk

The Art of Unit Testing, Manning http://amzn.to/2rsERDu

The Art of Unix Programming, ESR http://amzn.to/2sIAXUZ

The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist, Brooks http://amzn.to/2rsPjev

The Effective Engineer, Lau http://amzn.to/2s9fY0X

The Elements of Style, Strunk and White http://amzn.to/2svB3Qz

The Healthy Programmer, Kutner http://amzn.to/2qQ2MtQ

The Linux Programming Interface, Kerrisk http://amzn.to/2rsF8Xi

The Mythical Man-Month, Brooks http://amzn.to/2rt0dAR

The Practice of Programming, Kernighan and Pike http://amzn.to/2qTje0C

The Pragmatic Programmer, Hunt and Thomas http://amzn.to/2s9dlvS

The Psychology of Computer Programming, Weinberg http://amzn.to/2rsPypy

Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques, Gray and Reuter http://amzn.to/

Types and Programming Languages, Pierce http://amzn.to/2qT2d6G

Understanding MySQL Internals, Pachev http://amzn.to/2svXuFo

Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Feathers http://amzn.to/2sIr09R

Zen of graphics programming, Abrash http://amzn.to/2rKIW6Q

I know you didn't ask for books but here are some interesting ones. The first two cover individuals and the last two cover the works of others.

Coders At Work (https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Program...)

Founders At Work (https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...)

Architecture of Open Source Systems (https://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Open-Source-Applications...)

Architecture of Open Source Systems - Vol 2 (https://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Open-Source-Applications...)

Oh wow, I was just reading about this yesterday in Coders At Work[0]. Douglas Crockford[1] worked on this at a company that was trying to do some distributing computing work in the 90s-00s. They originally based it off the JVM but SUN had issues with that so they turned it more in to what he described as a scripting language "which is what we have today."

[0]: http://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programm... [1]: http://javascript.crockford.com/

There are two excellent books that will answer most of your questions. The second book is harder to obtain (more expensive), as it is older. Each of the interviews are pretty detailed, down to nitty-gritty, often mundane details about the craft of programming.

http://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programm...

http://www.amazon.com/Programmers-at-Work-Susan-Lammers/dp/0...

I keep seeing this argument all the time. Lets put a counter-argument-by-authority: Fran Allen [1] thinks that the C was a huge step backwards in language design [2], and there is no reason to think that Go didn't repeat the same pattern.

Interestingly, the article you quoted mentions functional programming and immutable data as the step to go from 200K to 2M lines. Go is fundamentally incapable of functional programming* and its builtins allow pervasive mutable state.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_E._Allen

[2]: http://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programm...

* Its impossible to support FP without generics. Even the most basic higher order functions require type variables.

For anyone who hasn't browsed through Peter Seibel's "Coders at Work," one of his subjects is Fran Allen...it's kind of funny because I do agree that learning C has been valuable to the high-level programming I do today (but only because I was forced to learn it in school). But there's always another level below you that can be valuable...Allen says C killed her interest in programming...not because it was hard, but because of, in her opinion, it led engineers to abandon work in compiler optimization (her focus was in high-performance computing):

(Excerpted from: Peter Seibel. Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming (Kindle Location 6269). Kindle Edition: http://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programm... )

Seibel: When do you think was the last time that you programmed?

Allen: Oh, it was quite a while ago. I kind of stopped when C came out. That was a big blow. We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one nice problem after another. When C came out, at one of the SIGPLAN compiler conferences, there was a debate between Steve Johnson from Bell Labs, who was supporting C, and one of our people, Bill Harrison, who was working on a project that I had at that time supporting automatic optimization...The nubbin of the debate was Steve's defense of not having to build optimizers anymore because the programmer would take care of it. That it was really a programmer's issue....

Seibel: Do you think C is a reasonable language if they had restricted its use to operating-system kernels?

Allen: Oh, yeah. That would have been fine. And, in fact, you need to have something like that, something where experts can really fine-tune without big bottlenecks because those are key problems to solve. By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are ... basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities.

Assault is a loaded word to describe a honest observation based on a needless graphic picture you painted. You might not need help to sort out your anger issues. But you certainly need some work on your politeness skills. Here's a tip on the importance of that, politenes is appreciated as much as rudeness is abhorred.

Now onto your claims about open source developers from Brazil, Russia, India, Poland, and China. I'm going to ignore the fact you only backed it up with your imagination, and focus on the interesting part, your assumption. You assumed that all these fellow programmers didn't have access to books, older programmers, nor even computers, in the seventies. Despite of the fact that programmers from these countries have been consistently shipping great software for decades. What really staggers me is that you assume on behalf of all these people that they lack culture, just to prove your point.

Do humanity a favor, and go read a book [0]. Or at least try to leave home so you can talk to people, and finally work on your poor social skills.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programm...

Sadly I don't really read quite as much as I used to; but following are the books I read this year (though none of them were released this year).

- Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Problem...

Excellent book covering interviews with founders of companies that became really big. I thought this book was really insightful and inspirational.

- Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

http://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programm...

I just started this book, but already like it - the format is the same as the Founders at Work book but on the developer side of things.

- World Changers: 25 Entrepreneurs Who Changed Business as We Knew It

http://www.amazon.com/World-Changers-Entrepreneurs-Changed-B...

It was a good book, but not as inspirational as the Founders at Work book. Some of the stories are good, but since the majority of the people are not in my sector, the book just wasn't as interesting to me.

- Ready Player One

http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline/dp/03078...

An excellent story that really made me nostalgic to my younger years - definitely recommend this one.

- The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death: A Novel

http://www.amazon.com/Mystic-Arts-Erasing-Signs-Death/dp/034...

I have a weak spot for Charlie Huston books - he's not the best author (sorry Charlie), but his books are really easy to approach. This is one of his best ones and is about crime scene cleaners - a nice departure from all the Joe Pitt vampire novels.

- World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

http://www.amazon.com/World-War-Oral-History-Zombie/dp/03073...

It's OK... I read it half way through and then once I got busy I just couldn't get myself to pick it up again. I will finish it eventually.. just not yet.

- Hyperion

http://www.amazon.com/Hyperion-Dan-Simmons/dp/0553283685

A friend recommended this book to me - I could not get past the first chapter.

Original article: (http://gawker.com/5520339/mac-genius-slams-his-google-job)

Which quotes a little chunk from the book Coders at Work (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Progra...)

(Anyway I can trim that amazon URL into something nicer without using url-shorteners?)

Of a similar note, but comes off very different (to me at least):

Coders at work http://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programm...

I'm more of a fiction kind of guy so I'll have to recommend this:

Cryptonomicon http://www.amazon.com/Cryptonomicon-Neal-Stephenson/dp/B004R...

(The kindle edition is more than the paperback but if you do want to travel light the kindle edition will definitely be worth the extra bucks as it is one of those thick thousand page mass market paperbacks)

My strong anti-C++ bent comes from having used in in demanding production situations for 12 years. It is a beast. When Scott Meyers of http://www.amazon.com/Effective-Specific-Addison-Wesley-Prof... fame reads a book on C++ template programming and is surprised, no, astonished! at some of the things done there, and attempts to write auto_ptr and fails at least twice.

It takes way to long to learn (probably 2 years for a developer working with it 8 hours a day), and the grown ups don't like it either: http://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programm...

This isn't even an ugly chick.

I don't necessarily know of any one book that meets all of your friends requirements, but...

Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine might be good for your friend.

http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/03164...

Another good option might be Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold.

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...

Or, how about Coders at Work?

http://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programm...

Another one that I have (but haven't had time to read yet) is Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg. It might have something that your friend would find interesting.

http://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-Code-Programmers-Transcendent...

Another one that may be inspirational, although it's more about personalities than computer science per-se, would be Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Lev...

Programming Language Pragmatics by Michael L. Scott: The explanations of many things I'd read in other sources are no less than fantastic, I now understand a bunch of things I had only superficially "got" previously. http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-Third-..., check out the overview and reviews.

Coders at Work by Peter Seibel: By far the best of this type of book (well, not counting the '80s classic Programmers at Work which I haven't read since then), one of the best Lisp authors interviews in depth a lot of really interesting and/or important people, from James Zawinski to Donald Knuth, with Javascript, static FP and PARC people, Guy Steele, Peter Norvig, Ken Thompson, Fran Allen (really important interview which points out how C/C++ to the exclusion of truly high level languages have been a disaster when used beyond their proper niches), etc. All are masters who've gotten their hands dirty, many are theory people as well. http://www.amazon.com/Coders-at-Work-Peter-Seibel/dp/1430219...

Garbage Collection by Jones Lins: Pretty much the only book in the field (except for the forthcoming Advanced Garbage Collection sequel in the middle of this year), covers the territory as of the mid-90s. Much more fun than trying to track down 100 individual papers and trying to make sense of it all. Exposition is clear and you get a real feeling for the subtleties of the field (especially when you try fun things like generational and/or concurrent GC). http://www.amazon.com/Garbage-Collection-Algorithms-Automati...