Coders at work is finally available
codersatwork.com
codersatwork.com
For some reason, the description of this book just doesn't inspire me to read it. It's hard to articulate why that is, since it's in the same style as Founders, and it interviews a similar set of people.
Maybe it's just that I've heard enough from that generation of programmers. Maybe I've just heard enough from all programmers. Maybe, talking about programming is simply not interesting at all. I don't know.
Tell me about how you launched a billion dollar company from your apartment with stolen office chairs and I'm there. Tell me how you really like pointers, and I sort of lose interest.
I personally find the idea of this book to be fascinating and pre-ordered it a couple of weeks ago.
Don't you mean the intersection of the two?
Building a successful startup, selling stuff, getting investment etc etc - They seem orders of magnitude harder than programming.
So yes, perhaps this book will be more interesting to non-programmers, or people who are just starting out programming.
It's the other things I find more interesting, that were covered in founders at work - the things that seem like luck - how do you get people to use your product? How do you make money? build a team? etc etc.
This is precisely why I don't find those other things very interesting: they seem like luck (to a degree larger than things that interest me more, at least). Gambling is also uninteresting, for the same reason: there's too much luck involved.
Whoa! doesn't that depend very much on what exactly you mean by "programming" and which specific program you are trying to create ?
The hard bit of course would be getting people to use it.
The world is absolutely littered with fantastic clever well written programs, that no one uses. This is why I think programming is far easier than convincing someone to use it and all that other non-programming stuff, and why I personally am far more interested in the non-technical side of the equation. In comparison, the technical side is trivial.
From my experience most people seem to have their wall at which point they can't possibly conceive of a better way to scale X until someone comes along and goes "Try this". My experience also says this level is pretty low for most people.
Google :)
> The world is absolutely littered with fantastic clever well written programs, that no one uses.
The world is also littered with twitter/facebook/youtube clones that no one uses.
What sets apart the wannabes from the successful ones is (among other things) the implementation.
I find much joy in doing clever things. If those things end-up being used by other people then I literary have an orgasm. But doing something simple that happens to end-up popular because of happening at the right time ... that's really a turn-off (look honey, this website of mine got really popular so now I have to maintain it ... oh joy). Fortunately that happens less and less because the low-hanging fruits are already taken.
And, unlike programming, which is "easy" to learn in the sense that there's a hell of a lot of resources that teach you how to do it, there simply is no way to learn how to be the next Branson.
Well then, the analogy (for programming) should be to become someone like Ken Thompson . And that's equally hard (or harder).
Being a really great X guy, is really hard, for most values of X.
Being an awesome excellent violinist (say) doesn't mean success in any "measurable way" either. There is no absolute, objective ranking for violinist, but becoming an "awesome excellent" violinist is still just as hard or harder than becoming Richard Branson.
End users don't care if a program was written well or not. They care if it solves their problem. There are countless examples of horrible buggy badly written programs that are wildly successful. There aren't many examples of horrible bad violinists that are successful.
When the argument was made that success has meanings beyond "how much money someone made" or needs an absolute scale of measurement to define it, you are now saying that software that is not well written can be successful, Sure, but by that logic then many businessmen get rich by luck, not by being "awesome excellent business guys". So ? Still doesn't affect the irrelevance of your original argument.
There are godawful musicians who lip synch songs and can barely maintain pitch but are successful in terms of making money. You need to let go of thinking that your ideas of what "success" is, is somehow universally held or accepted.
( I am done with this thread. It isn't worth the time. )
You are committing the logical fallacy of converse accident, essentially saying: "All awesome excellent business guys I have heard of is are successful financially, therefore it is true that all excellent business guys are successful." Survivor bias comes into play here too -- you don't get to hear stories of those with the exact same set of skills and personality as other 'business greats' who went bankrupt.
"Maybe some recognition from peers, but certainly not in monetary terms."
You can measure success in ways other than money. A programmer can count the number of users who have benefitted from using their code. A violinist can count number of standing ovations at concerts. An athlete can count number of medals/trophies. A parent can count number of successful children content with life.
Not everyone defines their success in terms of their net worth.
Thank you. I thought I was the only one.
95% of the time I program. 5% I conduct business.
But for learning, the ratio is reversed. Whether it's hacker news, the articles I read on the web, or the books on my shelves, my interest is mainly in business stories, especially start-up success stories.
Not really sure why. Maybe because I think I have all the technology I need. If I need more, I'll find it and learn it. Always have, always will. It's nice to learn a new technique here and there, especially with data base and web technology, but that's rare.
The business success stories, OTOH, almost always fascinate me. I love Founders at Work and for some odd reason, Marcus Frind of plentyoffish is like a mythic hero to me: If a regular guy like him can do it, then so can the rest of us.
Thankfully (for the authors and publishers), for some of us, that is reversed. The phrasing can be different.
"Tell me how and why you created a new language, and I am interested. Tell me how hard work and determination is how you made your money and the key to success for the rest of us and I lose interest"
EDIT: Ok I am reading the pdf version now and it is VERY enjoyable.
from the first chapter/interview
"Seibel: What about XScreenSaver—do you still work on that? Zawinski: I still write new screen savers every now and then just for kicks, and that’s all C.
Seibel: Do you use some kind of IDE for that?
Zawinski: I just use Emacs, mostly. Though recently, I ported XScreenSaver to OS X. The way I did that was I reimplemented Xlib in terms of Cocoa, the Mac graphics substrate, so I wouldn’t have to change the source code of all the screen savers. They’re still making X calls but I implemented the back end for each of those. And that was in Objective C, which actually is a pretty nice language. I enjoyed doing that. It definitely feels Java-like in the good ways but it also feels like C. Because it’s essentially C, you can still link directly with C code and just call the functions and not have to bend over backwards."
............................................
"Seibel: Six or seven being the whole Netscape development team or the Unix development team?
Zawinski: That was the whole client team. There were also the server folks who were implementing their fork of Apache, basically. We didn’t talk to them much because we were busy. We had lunch with them, but that was it. So we figured out what we wanted to be in the thing and we divided up the work so that there were, I guess, no more than two people working on any part of the project. I was doing the Unix side and Lou Montulli did most of back-end network stuff. And Eric Bina was doing layout and Jon Mittelhauser and Chris Houck were doing the Windows front end and Aleks Toti and Mark Lanett were doing the Mac front end for the pre–version 1.0 team. Those teams grew a little bit after that. But we’d have our meetings and then go back to our cubicles and be heads-down for 16 hours trying to make something work.
" ...........................................
"They thought just by virtue of being here, they were bound for glory doing it their way. But when they were doing it their way, at their company, they failed. So when the people who had been successful said to them, “Look, really, don’t use C++; don’t use threads,” they said, “What are you talking about? You don’t know anything.” Well, it was decisions like not using C++ and not using threads that made us ship the product on time. The other big thing was we always shipped all platforms simultaneously; that was another thing they thought was just stupid. “Oh, 90 percent of people are using Windows, so we’ll focus on the Windows side of things and then we’ll port it later.” Which is what many other failed companies have done. If you’re trying to ship a cross-platform product, history really shows that’s how you don’t do it. If you want it to really be cross-platform, you have to do them simultaneously. The porting thing results in a crappy product on the second platform.
They didn’t start from scratch with a blank disk but they eventually replaced every line of code. And they used C++ from the beginning. Which I fought against so hard and, dammit, I was right. It bloated everything;
"
...........................................
there's lots of interesting anecdotes and insights about his work with Peter Norvig at Berkeley, with Lucid and at Netscape and how he learned lisp and how he hates perl but uses it anyway and the hardest bug he ever encountered ( real doozy but i won't spoil the surprise for you) and so on .. And that's just Chapter 1.
I must be weird but I really enjoy reading stuff like that.
I can certainly see why this sort of thing would appeal to some folks. For me though, I don't think I could sit through a whole book of bitter guys complaining: "they rewrote my thing in C++ and it failed. Told you so!"
Founders was about inspiration. From what you show, Coders is not.
For you, sure. I find both inspiring (in different ways).
The point was it depends on the person. I would be bored stiff listening to yet another business guy talk about how he made his billions. I like programmers stories about their successes, failures, learning and insights. As someone else said , "different strokes".
"I don't think I could sit through a whole book of bitter guys "
If you think Don Knuth, Peter Norvig, Simon Peyton Jones and Jamie Zawinski (randomly picked from the book's interviewees) are "bitter guys complaining" (!), based on one sentence in a small set of excerpts(!!), this book is certainly not for you!
I like Founders at Work. I like Coders at Work. They are both great books.
I'm really looking forward to reading about Brad Fitzpatrick. He founded Live Journal, and made or started a lot of the software that powers many giant web startups (Memchached, MogileFS, OpenID...etc).
Update: It's also hasn't been submitted for Amazon Search Inside scanning or Google Book Search. If authors retain their digital rights, they can submit to both (plus Kindle) services quite easily from a variety of source formats -- circumventing ancient publisher pipelines. Alas.
> I wouldn't consider buying this without a Kindle option.
I completely don't grok how you could use delivery mechanism as the sole criteria for passing up on knowledge. It's a book for crying out loud, not some giant machine that takes up half a room.
EDIT: bad assumption, consider the above more a reply to GP than parent. That said I am always bemused by disdain for physical books. If you worry about bulk you can always read it then resell it or give it away. For books deemed worthy, the knowledge gained is well worth the sticker price even if you don't end up keeping it.
Coders At Work barely appeals to me. If I could easily get it, I would think about it, since there's no risk to Kindle purchases. On the other hand: In my room right now I have a total of five books, which have been carefully selected as the only books I felt were worth bringing with me, so that when I move out I don't need to worry about having lost a thing. Coders At Work doesn't deserve to be mentioned alongside those five books, and it will not have a place in my room unless it's digitized and e-paper'd.
Then on the Kindle I have all the Asimov, medium-length novels, nonfiction, kid's books, essays, etc. It's a dream set-up and it all fits in a backpack.
Nah, not really. That's mental. Reading in your car is dangerous.
My understanding is this is a common reaction. Also note related death of reading, death of concentration memes/psychology.
I think that completes the entire coder-interview genre.
- Tesla claimed that he could envisage an entire complex machine (and run it, so he could watch which parts wear out), without experimenting or prototyping or designing anything - as a contrast to Edison.
- Henri Poincaré claimed that complex new insights came to him fully formed (after immersing himself in their details), from his unconscious.
Re Simon Peyton Jones: Functional programming is the future of imperative programming and always will be.
But $21?! I might as well pay the extra $9 and have a nice physical artifact to show for it.
[1] http://getsatisfaction.com/oreilly/topics/amazon_hardcopy_is...
Does anyone else find it irritating to read "He invented JSON", which isn't true at all? He popularized and called out JSON which already existed.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=crockford...
It seems like other people often say that he invented it, even though he doesn't say that.
edit: And then they switched it back. Grrrr.
Looking forward to reading the book, Peter.
Sweet.
Here in India, I can only purchase a few selected O'Reilly titles, for which I have to travel across the city. Apress, Wrox, Packt are all available somewhere, but I still haven't found an accessible (read: near a Metro line) retail outlet that keeps those books.
That's because as AI becomes more sophisticated, programming will become more like teaching.
And teaching is something that mostly interests women today.
May I ask you what your cultural background is ?
No.
Some things that seem strange to me might make perfect sense to someone with a background sufficiently different from mine.
Some remote family member of mine for instance firmly believed (deceased) that women 'have their place', and with that he definitely didn't mean university.
I found that a pretty bizarre statement (even as a kid) but in light of his particular cultural background I find it easier to accept that that was his point of view.
Edit: khafra, thanks a lot for editing the post. This reaffirms my faith that HN is an exceptionally good online community.
1) if you make remarks online you always have to remember that you are speaking 'in public' and that anybody that wants to know more about you probably can and will.
2) that the timing of the disclosure was less than elegant to put it mildly, he already said 'no', that should have been enough (it was for me).
3) that the same thing happening on reddit several days ago apparently is what drove Khafra to wonder just like I did if this might be a cultural thing. If someone makes a point out of continuously harping on a very controversial opinion then that will make people curious about you. Still, point (2) holds strong and that should not have been done. I don't know if Khafra can still remove the post but if I were him I would do so.
I find that hard to believe.
> And teaching is something that mostly interests women today.
I'm all for more balance but to either relegate women to teaching because 'that mostly interests women' (for which I have no evidence, my classes were pretty much 60/40 men/women, with the men predominant in the maths/physics/chemistry department, but that was a while ago) or to assume that men are not interested in it (they are), whichever way I slice it I can't make much sense of it.
Would you mind explaining ?
(Parent comment originally said just 'men'. Since been edited to include women :/ )
That means that every professor, whether teaching, researching or both, irrespective of their gender is engaged in this. Some professors put the accent on research, others spend as much of their time teaching as they can, for most of them it is a mix.
I do not see any argument why men or women would be predisposed to go one way or the other.
My suspicion is that you have some bias that you should get rid of to see things more in perspective.
Maybe this is your personal experience (which is always a possibility) but the world is a very large place and very few generalizations hold if you have a large enough sample.
Yours will almost certainly not stand the test of being exposed to the world the way I see it.
Learning disability?