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, “I'm just going to go ahead and do it,” the fearlessness of saying, “I don't understand everything that's going on, but I went into the documentation and I learned these three things. I tried it and it worked, so I'm just going to go ahead.” That gets you to a certain point, but I think to really be a good programmer, you can't just do that. You have to understand a little bit more, and say, “Is it safe, what I'm doing here? Or what are the failure cases? Sure, I tried it once and it worked, but is it always going to work? How do I write test cases to show that and to understand it a little better, and then once I've done that, can I extract what I've done and publish a new tool that other people can use because I've put these pieces together in a certain way.”

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 because it was one of the biggest set of books I had, and it was just the right height. That was nice because it was always there, and I guess then I was more prone to use it as a reference because it was just right in front of me.

Seibel: But you had to lift up the monitor every time you wanted to look at it?

Norvig: No, I had the box set. You had to pull hard, but you could pull one of the box. Now I'm less likely to use any book for reference—I'm just likely to do a search.