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 that’s going on in the computer. There are things that are absolutely out of your control because it’s impossible to know everything about all the software. Back in the ’70s a computer had only 4,000 words of memory. It was possible to do a core dump and inspect every word to see if it was what you expected. It was reasonable to read the source listings of the operating system and see how that worked. And I did that—I studied the disk routines and the card-reader routines and wrote variants of my own. I felt as if I understood how the entire IBM 1130 worked. Or at least as much as I cared to know. You just can’t do that anymore.

Seibel: Were there books that were important to you when you were learning to program?

Steele: In the ’70s, absolutely: Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming.

Coders at Work – Page 332 – Guy Steele