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Seibel: What about The Art of Computer Programming? Some of the people I've talked to on this have absolutely read it from cover to cover. Some people have it on the shelf and use it as a reference. And some people just have it on the shelf.

Norvig: At one point I had it as my monitor stand beca…

Norvig: I think the people that are really successful are the same—at least that's what I see around here. But, yeah, it is a little bit more of, “Can I quickly get an understanding of what I need,” and less of, “I need complete understanding.” I think some of it is bravado, this willingness to say…

Armstrong: Yes. Why this is I don't know. The funny thing is, if you give two programmers the same problem—it depends on the problem, but problems of a more mathematical nature, they can often end up writing the same code. Subject to just formatting issues and relabeling the variables and the funct…

Armstrong: Well, as an undergraduate some of the courses involved writing programs and I really enjoyed that. And I got to be very good at debugging. If all else failed, I would debug people's programs. The standard debugging was one beer. Then it would go up—a two-beer problem or a three-beer prob…

Seibel: Speaking of writing intricate code, I've noticed that people who are too smart, in a certain dimension anyway, make the worst code. Because they can actually fit the whole thing in their head they can write these great reams of spaghetti code.

Bloch: I agree with you that people who are …