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Is there a reading list of famous/known programmers or (CS) engineers or ? biographies or related ?
A friend ask about some suggestions, and other than Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, I really don't have a clue.
Any suggestions ?
Thanks,
Max.
I'd rather be phishing!
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Alan Turing[^]? Dennis Ritchie[^]? Bjarne Stroustrup[^]?
I'm sorry there isn't a page yet for a programmer named, "Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan". Someday when there will be, I'd send you the link for that too. 
The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
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Wikipedia is not really what I was looking for.
I'd rather be phishing!
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Ada Lovelace? [^]
(Sorry, couldn't help it.)
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Why sorry ?
It is the kind of reference my friends will love to look into.
I'd rather be phishing!
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Sorry because 1) it wasn't a book, and 2) I think most people that you ask about famous programmers will likely whip her out...
Although, when it came to data sciences, she was about 150 - 200 years ahead of her time.
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Unfortunately, most non-IT people would think you meant to reference Linda Lovelace [^]"!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Alan Turing: The Enigma, by Andrew Hodges is a great biography. Don't let the fact that this was the inspiration for "The Imitation Game" be of concern. In typical Hollywood style, the movie takes many liberties with the facts.
If you're interested in computer history, then perhaps The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder might be of interest. This details the design and construction of the Data General Eclipse MV/8000/8000. It was published in 1981, and won the 1982 Pulitzer prize for non fiction.
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It isn't exactly a biography, but I've always enjoyed Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming.
It's a series of Q&A style interviews of a pretty diverse set of well known programmers:
- Frances Allen: \Pioneer in optimizing compilers, first woman to win the Turing Award (2006) and first female IBM fellow
- Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang
- Joshua Bloch: Author of the Java collections framework, now at Google
- Bernie Cosell: One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMPs and a master debugger
- Douglas Crockford: JSON founder, JavaScript architect at Yahoo!
- L. Peter Deutsch: Author of Ghostscript, implementer of Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1
- Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation
- Brad Fitzpatrick: Writer of LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, and Perlbal
- Dan Ingalls: Smalltalk implementor and designer
- Simon Peyton Jones: Coinventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler
- Donald Knuth: Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX
- Peter Norvig: Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI
- Guy Steele: Coinventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five, currently working on Fortress
- Ken Thompson: Inventor of UNIX
- Jamie Zawinski: Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker
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Thanks for sharing. I'm going to read that web server one as soon as I get a chance. 
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Real cool dude, seriously 
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"Art of war" by Sun Tsu: it helps to kiss ass managers
Press F1 for help or google it.
Greetings from Germany
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Umm, not sure what Bill Gates has personally programmed by himself except maybe QBasic and Steve Jobs didn't do programming at all. They were business people and entrepreneurs. They used to hire programmers.
it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features yet.
modified 20-Oct-19 21:02pm.
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FAT was apparently done by him... during a flight, no less!
Link left for the fun that's in the comments: I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven’s sake[^]
Highlights:
■ "Noobies, each and every one of you. I built a NAND gate in 1924 using twigs and moss. For delay lines I used a box canyon, and moved about until the acoustic echo distribution in the time domain performed the required function. By May 1925 I had calculated Pi to almost one digit accuracy: 4."
■ "This has to be a myth. FAT predates laptops or any other computer that would reasonably be usable on an airplane.
[You kids say the cutest things. -Raymond]"
■ "(I can’t believe I had to write this: This is a dramatization, not a courtroom transcript.)
This “I wrote FAT on an airplane” line was apparently one Bill used when he wanted to complain that what other people was doing wasn’t Real Programming. But this time, the development manager decided she’d had enough.
“Fine, Bill. We’ll set you up with a machine fully enlisted in the Windows source code, and you can help us out with some of your programming magic, why don’t you.”
This shut him up."
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Um, he and his mates were the ones that made "writing code in your Mother's garage, while blasting out hard rock" famous, when they wrote MSDOS*
* You can skip googling the MSDOS/QDOS-86 thing. I know. And everyone here should be aware that upgrading something like QDOS-86 to become MSDOS (and to be used on different hardware, which was much more of a minefield, back then) was no small thing.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I enjoyed Show Stopper!
It covers a number of programmers including Dave Cutler.
[^]
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K&R comes to mind. Best book ever crafted! The first to introduce to the world a "Hello, World" in pure C
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I saw the following two headlines next to each other in the CP "Daily News" yesterday:
Tech coalitions pen open letter to Burr and Feinstein over bill banning encryption
Microsoft rolls out new programs to incent IT pros to go cloud
OK, we know that Feinstein and Co. have produced something that is DOA all the way around, but still, the juxtaposition of these two headlines made me ask the question: Would any company or any responsible IT pro put their stuff out on the web without some decent encryption to protect it?
It seems to me that the current concept of "cloud" that Microsoft is betting so heavily on would become instantly dead in the US if anything like the Feinstein/whoever bill came into effect. I know that (as written) "Feinstein" contains "Einstein", but it sure seems like the spelling is all they share...
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