Programmers at Work
By Susan Lammers
With a new introduction, the 40th Anniversary Edition
Programmers at Work, is a collection of candid in-depth interviews that probe the minds of 19 notable programmers of the PC era. Highlighting the forces, events, and personalities that shaped their work, they also describe how to approach software design in constraint driven environments, the art and science of coding, and how they envisioned the future of computing. Including original sketches and program samples, it serves as a historical record, and a masterclass for software developers working today.
Buy The Book:
Publication Date: July 2026. Originally published 1986. Length: 400 pages | ISBN13: 9798993755304 | Publisher: 8080 Books/Simon & Schuster
“Programmers at Work… does for budding software writers what the Paris Review interviews did for would-be fiction writers. It provides comfort, inspiration, and a sense of community with those who have already succeeded in the field…it is not to be missed.”
“Each of the 19 interviews…is like a kind of Crackerjack box—the Utterly Disarming, Frequently Astonishing Insight is the prize.”
“Susan Lammers has attempted, and brought off in great style, one of these risky but rewarding world of ideas books: a series of gentle, insightful ‘let the subject speak’ interviews with 19 star programmers....This book is highly recommended—and as interesting a read for the computerphobe as for the computerphile.”
“This book is must reading for anyone interested in the design and creation of great computer programs.”
“Read this to Understand Programmers. 5.0 out of 5 stars I have to say, this is a great book, almost unique in its scope; I wish there were more books like this. There are many collections of short biographies of mathematicians, and a few of computer scientists, but that’s not quite the same as programmers. If you want to know what programmers do, the best thing is to read their code, but failing that (or in addition to that) you need to read interviews like this….It may still take you ten years to become an expert programmer, but carefully reading this book should speed up your quest, or at least let you understand better the programmers around you.”
“For anyone who’s wondered how (and more interestingly, why) personal-computer software tools are crafted and whether the people who do the work are anything like those cartoon- character nerds of song and story, this is a delightful, insightful book....You’ll learn a great deal about the world of dangerous ideas and intellectual challenges, intense commitment and breaking out of the constraints of how-it’s-done-here.”
About the book
At the outset of personal computing, the engineers who invented it had almost nothing to work with, and used that nothing to create everything. Programmers at Work 40th Anniversary Edition brings together landmark interviews with nineteen of the most influential software architects who ever lived: Charles Simonyi, who shaped modern productivity software at Microsoft; Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, who invented the spreadsheet; Andy Hertzfeld, who conjured the original Macintosh and fifteen more who wrote the code that changed how humanity thinks, works, and creates.
These interviews are not just retrospectives. They are primary sources — candid, technical, alive — capturing how these minds actually worked: how they designed under pressure, wrote code in memory-starved machines, and solved problems that no one had ever encountered before. Their insights are both a history of a revolutionary era and a masterclass in constraint-driven engineering.
As edge computing, IoT, and robotics once again demand that developers do more with radically less, the discipline forged in the 64KB era turns out to be exactly the discipline the future requires. Complete with original program diagrams, algorithms, and code samples, Programmers at Work is the rare technical book that is also a remarkable story — and the rare history book that is also a working manual.
List of software architects included: Charles Simonyi, Butler Lampson, John Warnock, Gary Kildall, Bill Gates, John Page, C. Wayne Ratliff, Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston, Jonathan Sachs, Ray Ozzie, Peter Roizen, Robert Carr, Jef Raskin, Andy Hertzfeld, Toru Iwatani, Scott Kim, Jaron Lanier, Michael Hawley.