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.
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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).
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)"
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.
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...