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
