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Programmers At Work

Via Scott Rosenberg (whose book Dreaming in Code I think we mentioned here before), I learn than Susan Lammers is making the interviews from her 1984 book Programmers At Work available on the Web.

Here is how she describes the goals of her new site:

Many people have urged me over the years to do a second Programmers At Work (PAW) with a new generation of programmers and I’ve sketched out the project, made lists of new folks to feature, done inquiries, thought about going back to talk to the guys in the original edition, and other variations . Now with this web site, I will make the original interviews available online, and perhaps it will become the seed for a more “thoroughly modern” approach to the PAW series. What I’m hoping we can kindle on this site is an ongoing exploration and dynamic conversation with the "connected" community of programmers on the web about the creative process in programming.

Who better than the LtU community to contribute to such a conversation?

The first PAW interview posted to the site is the interview with Charles Simonyi, a man whose views of the future of programming, and programming languages, are mentioned here often (though not always with great enthusiasm).

By Ehud Lamm at 2008-02-29 08:02 | General | other blogs | 13626 reads

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Structure or content

It would be interesting to pursue Simonyi's view of complexity. A knowledge representation can be very complex, but the representation system might be fairly orderly. There is a difference between structure and content.

By Hank Thediek at Fri, 2008-02-29 12:42 | login or register to post comments

Something of a mind-bomb, in a good way, reading that

So many neat thoughts from 1984, wow.

Does anybody know of a good wiki list of "wonderful tricks"? I think that would be a great thing. (If it doesn't exist: make it?)

By raould at Fri, 2008-02-29 20:10 | login or register to post comments

Simonyi's research

Simonyi's Intentional Programming/Software strongly relates to DSL, which -- I believe-- is an active research area in FP. I find it interesting that his recent paper at OOPSLA 2006 doesn't mention or compare their work to any related DSL research in the functional world. Obviously, Simonyi attacks the problem from the tool's perspective (Domain Workbench) while the FP world from the PLT perspective. I'm wondering how much Simonyi is aware of the recent FP researches in DSL.

By sciomako at Mon, 2008-03-03 01:52 | login or register to post comments