Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming (2009)
codersatwork.com
codersatwork.com
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2092681
It contains interviews with 19 prominent programmers from that era - some of who you’ll definitely recognize. I remember particularly enjoying the Tori Iwatani one - he’s the creator of PacMan.
The full list: Charles Simonyi, Butler Lampson, John Warnock, Gary Kildall, Bill Gates, John Page, Wayne Ratliff, Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston, Jonathan Sachs, Ray Ozzie, Peter Roizen, Bob Carr, Jef Raskin, Andy Hertzfeld, Scott Kim, Jaron Janier, Michael Hawley
I read this ages ago and thought it might be a rare book - but it looks like used copies are still available really cheaply. Not sure if the second edition had updates - looks like it’s from 1989. Anyway, I highly recommend picking up a copy.
https://www.alibris.com/Programmers-at-Work-Interviews-Susan...
https://www.alibris.com/Programmers-at-Work-Interviews-with-...
Aside from two readable but not great scans of the two different editions (1986, 1989), with appendices, there's also one version with interviews only that's not scanned, seemingly ripped from Lammers' self-published blog, which is still up but now only has about half the interviews. She probably published all of the interviews there at one point (or else someone reconstructed the missing interviews from the scans while copy/pasting the ones she republished).
> “The problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.”—Joe Armstrong
That applies to almost every framework and dependency out there.
It's crazy to load a Web page, that adds almost 1MB of JS, so it can animate something that could have been done with a couple of lines of CSS.
Love Fran Allen's interview regarding C early days, versus other ecosystems.
As anyone coding in the 1980's home computers knows, any junior doing Assembly could easily beat those compilers.
It was the abuse from UB in optimising compilers that eventually made the difference.
"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."
Next question: How did C do that? By becoming dictator? No, it did it by persuading people that C was a better direction than those other ecosystems. That is, the other direction lost the debate. How and why?
My current best guess is a riff on Bob Martin's (?) observation about new programmers (noobs) are minted faster than wisdom of the ancients can be transmitted. An ever expanding circle of ignorance, the center occupied by cranky old people yelling "But you're doing it wrong!" to no one in particular.
So when 'C' emerged, amongst otherwise equal options (to noobs), perhaps it appeared to have both the 'portable' bit fiddly bits (vs ASM) and the structured programming bits of Pascal. And natch, noobs wouldn't be immediately aware of the broken glass and tiger traps.
Further, like with all grifts, there's a turf grab for the new hotness. Something along the lines of "Turbo Pascal was for casuals. Real programmers, like you, should use Watcom's professional new 'C' compiler."
--
I was so enamored with object-oriented analysis and programming. A real zealot. Two (different) friends with experience were "meh". I vividly remember thinking "Those old people just don't get it."
Ahahahah. The folly of youth. Of course, they were proven right. (But also wrong in some ways.)
I try to remember young me now that I'm old, eschewing each new hotness, while trying to keep an open mind, gleaning whatever good bits tumble out.
The Fran Allen quote seems to be saying that C made all this promising research stop. Bell Labs did not have armed thugs going out pointing guns at peoples' heads. Why did the research stop, if it was so promising? Because the researchers (many, at least) decided it was less promising - or at least, that more promising options were now available. So if C did that, it did it by either showing that previous directions weren't promising, or by opening up better options. Either way, it's rather unfair to mourn the paths that were not pursued and blame C for it.
I have a litmus test. Every few years, I compile code which does doubly-linked list operations:
struct node {
struct node *next, *prev;
};
/* Original: pred and succ must not overlap, but this is not expressed. */
void insert_after_A(struct node *pred, struct node *succ)
{
succ->prev = pred;
succ->next = pred->next;
pred->next->prev = succ;
pred->next = succ;
}
/* Optimize with restrict: pred and succ do not overlap. */
void insert_after_B(struct node *restrict pred, struct node *restrict succ)
{
succ->prev = pred;
succ->next = pred->next;
pred->next->prev = succ;
pred->next = succ;
}
/* Optimize by hand in "load-store style". */
void insert_after_C(struct node *pred, struct node *succ)
{
struct node *aft = pred->next;
succ->prev = pred;
succ->next = aft;
aft->prev = succ;
pred->next = succ;
}
Simply adding restrict is a simpler manual optimization, but it's dangerous; now demons are allowed to fly out of our noses when the arguments point to overlapping objects, which doesn't happen in function C.
And what's the use of restrict, when I can get the same benefit by coding in a certain way.
Seems like they just worked hard.
I have come to the same conclusion.
> Seems like they just worked hard.
I would like to draw another conclusion. Fitzgerald operated live journal from his bedroom as a teenager - so he was at the brink of new technology. Same effect that gave rise to Bill Gates. There are probably more effects at play, like working for a company that does not waste your time doing bullshit tasks and having a mentor to get you started. Even a like minded individual will increase your chances to overcome obstacles.
My day starts debugging some arcane shell scripts embedded in some yaml in the CI tool; at afternoon I need to optimise some SQL query moving several sub queries that makes the execution plan costly and transform it in small steps in temporary small tables; and before I leave I just noticed some bug in production caused by wrong typing in Go and I need to fix it.
I mean, it’s hard to think about the work that I am doing going towards to a mastery state.
I really appreciate those histories, but for me it’s more or less watching Apocalypse Now from the perspective of a low level cooker/dish washer on the grand scheme of things.
I had a discussion with a developer who cut his teeth on mainframes in the 70s. We had the same opinion about today's overly heavy process getting in the way of achievement and talented people. Scrum & Agile have become a quasi-religion and the idea of a programmer saying "leave me alone for a month and I'll give you some software that solves the problem" are long gone. For better or worse.
And before someone says "well, then you're doing Agile wrong." Yes. We are. As is damn near EVERY shop I've encountered in the past 10 years. That's the point. It's a mess and the culture is broken.
Wish we could just go back 20 years and Code at Work, build things that people want and need, and treat it as a craft again.
Mentioning Reddit, I'm still salty they deleted private messages from before 2023. They couldn't even provide an archive for people to download?!? Utterly bizarre.
IIRC HN do lock new conversations on post after 1(?) months though.
One of the things I really enjoyed was seeing how differently all of the interviewees worked and went about their business. They didn't seem to work that much differently from me, which made their work that much more relatable.