Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

by Peter Seibel

It was just basically the way you solve some kind of an unknown puzzle—make tables and charts and get a little more information here and make a hypothesis. In general when I'm reading a technical paper, it's the same challenge. I'm trying to get into the author's mind, trying to figure out what the concept is. The more you learn to read other people's stuff, the more able you are to invent your own in the future, it seems to me. We ought to publish code. The Lions Book is available. And Bill Atkinson's programs are now publicly available thanks to Apple, and it won't be too long before we'll be able to read that. That's well-documented code with lots of pioneering graphics algorithms in it. Seibel: Certainly with open source there's a lot more code out there to read than there used to be. Knuth: Yeah, that's right. But the more varieties of different kinds of notations are still useful—don't only read the people who code like you.