Category: Programming

Seibel: You were the only person I contacted about this book who had a really strong reaction to the word coder in the title. How would you prefer to describe yourself? Deutsch: I have to say at this point in my life I have even a mildly negative reaction to the word programmer. If you

Perhaps the most forgotten for the massive public of the book. But, if you use the REPL you you are making a silent tribute, because the first REPL was created by Laurence Peter Deutsch. Link to Wikipedia Seibel: So is it OK for people who don’t have a talent for systems-level thinking to work on

Daniel (Dan) Ingalls is one of the creators of Smalltak. Other interesting development of engals was the Context Menu Seibel: Do you have any tips on how to be a good technical leader? Ingalls: The first thing is being clear about what you’re trying to do. The job is to get a clear vision. If

Seibel: So when you’re writing English, you’re obviously writing for a human reader and you seem to contrast that to writing software, which is for a computer. But lots of people—such as Knuth—make a big point that when you’re writing code you’re writing as much for human readers as for the computer. Steele: Oh, that’s

Seibel: Do you think languages are getting better? You keep designing them, so hopefully you think it’s a worthwhile pursuit. Is it easier to write software now because of advances that we’ve made? Steele: Well, it’s much easier now to write the kinds of programs we were trying to write 30 years ago. But I

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