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