
Coders at Work website is up and open to suggestions - darragjm
http://www.codersatwork.com/
======
jey
Aaron Swartz wrote something noteworthy? If so, it's not web.py.

How about:

\- Fabrice Bellard. wrote QEMU, TinyCC, FFMPEG, and an awesome IOCCC entry

\- Miguel de Icaza. wrote GNOME, Mono

\- Larry Page, Sergey Brin. wrote a program to DoS attack webservers

\- Bram Moolenaar. wrote everyone's favorite text editor

\- Richard Stallman. wrote two operating systems, one in Lisp (called
'emacs'), one in C (called 'GNU'). authored the GPL

\- Bjarne Stroustrup. created C++

\- Robert Morris. created the Internet Worm (aka "Morris Worm")

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abstractbill
If I had a dozen votes I'd probably use them all on Jamie Zawinski.

His wicked blend of humor, cynicism, realism and practicality make for some
fascinating stories and actually _useful_ advice.

He's worked with tons of interesting stuff - obviously XEmacs, Netscape and
Mozilla, but he also wrote a bunch of code for the legendary Lisp Machines
early in his career.

Peter Norvig called him "One of the best programmers I ever hired" -
<http://norvig.com/21-days.html>

You might have to be very persuasive to get an interview though. I think he
pretty much hates (1) being famous and (2) the software industry these days!

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euccastro
Gerald Jay Sussman, co-creator of Scheme and co-author of SICP.

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willarson
Reading the list I think there are frequent misuses of the term "invented". I
think terms such as implemented, developed, or even created are more accurate.
To say someone "invented" Rails is peculiar: there wasn't much about Rails'
concept that was revolutionary, what was (perhaps) revolutionary was its
implementation. I am perhaps focusing a bit too much on the trees rather than
the forest. :)

As jey's comment points out, selecting the programmers is going to be an
arbitrary process. For example its clearly in the vogue to dislike Aaron
Swartz, but I can't see why we'd want to focus on Robert Morris if you are
going to suggest that the Internet Worm was his great accomplishment (its
notoriety is largely the result of a mistake in the implementation causing it
to propagate too quickly, or at least so the story goes).

~~~
jey
In vogue or not, web.py is not _that_ interesting. Useful perhaps, but not
interesting.

I think people would rather hear about the "dude in a basement hacking for
pure excitement" story of the Internet Worm than other more recent stuff
Morris has done. It's just more suitable for this book than modular routers or
distributed hash tables.

~~~
willarson
I lose perspective on what generally passes as interesting sometimes, so good
point. Number one on my recent interest list has been writing web analytics
software, so you might suggest my opinion is a bit away from the norm. ;)

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bootload
A quick follow-up on _"Programmers at work"_ <http://tinyurl.com/3cb2qk> would
be good. I would add also ...

\- Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, (Mac dev team) <http://www.folklore.org>

\- Michael Abrash (Dr. Dobbs & PC Graphics)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Abrash>

\- Brian Kernighan <http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/bwk/>

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bayareaguy
Clicking on the names leads you to an ghost-town page.

Lack of any hint as to how I can vote for or against these folks leads me to
think there's a good chance people I'd like to hear from will be drowned out
by others who I've already heard enough from.

Lack of a web-based suggestion box makes me think the site is only going to
harvest my email and spam me later.

The premise has potential, but the implementation is lacking.

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hello_moto
Famous people (not necessary the best coders in their team), story of their
life = APress book = Money = $$$$$$$$$$$$

There's no measurement how great a coder is. An inventor, a creator, a leader,
now those attributes are better topics to write than coders.

~~~
euccastro
What about the people who want to read about coders?

~~~
hello_moto
You could just google them, ask them personally via e-mail. You don't need
someone to ask you "who's your favorite coders and tell the author about his
works". That's like asking you to do his job :)

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euccastro
Tim Peters, probably the most respected Python developer over Guido himself.

