Month: January 2023

Seibel: How much does a choice of language really matter? Are there good reasons to choose one language over another or does it all just come down to taste? Steele: Why shouldn’t taste be a good reason? Seibel: Well, I may like vanilla ice cream and you like chocolate, but we don’t fight about it.

Guy Steele is an academic know particularly because the “Lambda Papers”. Seibel: What has changed the most in the way you think about programming now, vs. then? Other than learning that bubble sort is not the greatest sorting technique. Steele: I guess to me the biggest change is that nowadays you can’t possibly know everything

Seibel: As a programmer, do you consider yourself a scientist, an engineer,an artist, or a craftsman? Norvig: Well, I know when you compare the various titles of books and so on, I always thought the “craft” was the right answer. So I thought art was a little pretentious because the purpose of art is to

Seibel: So what makes the better reviewers better? Norvig: Well, that they catch more things. Some of it is the trivial stuff of you indented the wrong number of spaces or whatever but some of it is, “I think this design would be cleaner if you moved this from here over to there.” So some

According the point of view about the way of doing software, that we can resume that try to develop the solver problem element. Another interesting topic where we can focus is the way to using testing to drive design. Something that now is knowing as: Test Driven Design Seibel: What about the idea of using

Seibel: Though your job now doesn’t entail a lot of programming you still write programs for the essays on your web site. When you’re writing these little programs, how do you approach it? Norvig: I think one of the most important things is being able to keep everything in your head at once. If you

Seibel: Speaking of things that aren’t taught as much, you’ve been both an academic and in industry; do you feel like academic computer science and industrial programming meet in the right place? Norvig: It’s a big question. I don’t think there’s a lot of waste in computer science curriculum. I think that it’s mostly very

Seibel: I’m surprised you think the master-programmer model is such a dumb idea. In your “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years” essay you make the point that programming is a skill that, like many skills, probably takes about a decade to really master. And lots of crafts hadmaster/journeymen/apprentice kind of hierarchies. So maybe nobody wants