Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

by Peter Seibel

Peyton Jones: Well, they also do some interesting work on testing APIs. Steven Clarke and his colleagues at Redmond have made systematic attempts to watch programmers, given a new API, talk through what they're trying to do. And they get the people who designed the API to sit behind a glass screen and watch them. And the guys sitting there behind the glass screen say, “No, no, don't do that! That's not the right way!” But it's soundproof. That turns out often to be very instructive. They go and change their API. To be honest, programming language research is weak on that score. But it is partly because these are difficult questions to answer. And culturally we're not well adapted to do it. I regard it as a weakness. But not one that I personally feel terribly well equipped to address.