I'm currently enjoying "Coders at Work - Reflections on the Craft of Programming", by Peter Seibel. It's a series of reflective interviews with various guru progammers. There's a few recurring questions which I thought might be fun for the monks to answer.

  1. Are there books every programmer should read? Have you read The Art of of Computer Programming by Knuth? Cover to cover? (books)
  2. Have you tried literate programming? Have you ever proved your code correct? (literate/proofs)
  3. To what degree is mathematics and mathematical thought important to programming?(maths)
  4. How to you get familiar with a substantial piece of someone else's code? Do you step through it? Have you read code for fun? What? (code reading)
  5. How do you prepare to code something new? How do you actually begin coding, top-down, bottom-up, tests, interfaces..? (new code)
  6. What makes a good programmer? If you are hiring programmers, what do you look for? (hiring)
  7. Have the skills changed required to be a good programmer changed? Are there key skills programmers must have? (skills)
  8. Do you think of yourself as a scientist, engineer, craftsman, artist or something else? (scientist..)

There's lot's more to ask, but I'll stop there

Update: added labels, just the numbers was confusing.

In reply to Questions from "Coders at Work" by bsb

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.