[the notes from the book were retrieved with kobogarden, with the purpose of aiding to create a map of the ideas the book left me. The full list of book highlights can be found here.]

These are, simply put, conversations between Seibel and many programmers. It was first released in 2009 — a little over 15 years ago! — but it very frequently seems set further back, as many of the interviewees recall how they got started with programming. A big bunch got started in highschool, but there are also interesting stories of reading a snippet of code that triggers some curiosity, or nonchalantly walking into university offices and slowly but surely getting more time with mainframe computers.

Zawinski: I read a lot of science fiction. I thought AI was really neat; the computers are going to take over the world. So I learned a little bit about that. I had a friend in high school, Dan Zigmond, and we were trading books, so we both learned Lisp. One day he went to the Apple Users Group meeting at Carnegie Mellon—which was really just a software-trading situation—because he wanted to get free stuff. And he's talking to some college student there who's like, “Oh, here's this 15-year-old who knows Lisp; that's novel; you should go ask Scott Fahlman for a job.” So Dan did. And Fahlman gave him one. And then Dan said, “Oh, you should hire my friend too,” and that was me. So Fahlman hired us. I think his motivation had to be something along the lines of, Wow, here are two high school kids who are actually interested in this stuff; it doesn't really do me much harm to let them hang out in the lab.” So we had basic grunt work—this set of stuff needs to be recompiled because there's a new version of the compiler; go figure out how to do that. Which was pretty awesome. So there are the two of us—these two little kids—surrounded by all these grad students doing language and AI research.

The computers, back then, were not as commoditized as now; programming was frequently done, even as a hobby, at a much lower level, and frequently one would only get access to manuals and code excerpts, wrangling the programming language mentally or on paper at first, much before running the code on real machines. This is only one of the aspects in which their founding experience is at odds with the contemporary practices; computing is not only ubiquitous, it is fast and cheap, and we are veering into the almost absurd territory of trying to sustain the most recent AI technology through gargantuan amounts of processing cycles alone.

The interviews usually start with how the interviewee started in the field; Seibel navigates the conversation wisely, dips into some technical terrain which still amuses the interested reader, to invariantly later rely on staple questions. Throughout the book, Donald Knuth is amply mentioned — Seibel will usually ask about the interviewee's relationship to The Art of Computer Programming — but TeX also gets immense praise, and there are many takes on literate programming. Lisp, or any close kin, gets plenty of attention too, and so does C++, and Javascript, and many, many more. This book really is a treat for the curious programmers and tinkerers alike.