This is the web site for a new book I'm working on for Apress, entitled Coders at Work, which will contain interviews with fifteen of the most interesting computer programmers alive today. It will be a companion volume to Apress’s Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston, and, like that book, a continuation of the tradition started by the Paris Review in 1953 when they published a Q&A interview with novelist E.M. Forster, inaugurating a series of interviews later titled “Writers at Work”. As the words “at work” suggest, my goal is to focus the interviews on how subjects tackle the day-to-day work of programming. Which is not to say we won't touch on other topics such as how they became great programmers, how they recognize programming talent in others, and what kinds of problems they find most interesting.1
Here are the fifteen folks whose interviews will appear in the book
| Jamie Zawinski | Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker. |
| Brad Fitzpatrick | Wrote LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, Perlbal |
| Douglas Crockford | JSON founder, JavaScript Architect at Yahoo! |
| Brendan Eich | Inventor of Javascript. CTO of the Mozilla Corporation |
| Joshua Bloch | Author of Java collections framework. Now at Google. |
| Joe Armstrong | Inventor of Erlang |
| Simon Peyton Jones | Co-inventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler. |
| Peter Norvig | Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI. |
| Guy Steele | Co-inventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five. Currently working on Fortress. |
| Dan Ingalls | Smalltalk implementor and designer. |
| L Peter Deutsch | Author of Ghostscript, Implemented Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1 |
| Ken Thompson | Inventor of UNIX |
| Bernie Cosell | One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMP's and a master debugger. |
| Fran Allen | Pioneer in optimizing compilers. First woman to win Turing Award (2006) and first woman IBM fellow. |
| Donald Knuth | Author of The Art of Computer Programming and TeX |
I’ve been working on this book for about two years and am now almost done. Thanks to everyone who helped me long ago figuring out who to interview and thanks, most of all, to my subjects, for giving me so much of their time. Look for the book at better bookstores later this year.
1. This book will also be similar, in some ways, to the 1986 book, Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers. My expectation is that Coders at Work will appeal to a bit more of a technical audience than Programmers at Work did. Also it’s been two decades since Programmers at Work came out, which is bound to have an effect on what we talk about.
0