Software Engineering discussion

Joshua wrote one of my favorite Java books, and one of my favorite programming books in general, "Effective Java." He also led the Java collection class effort, and many other seriously complex projects. While I found the whole interview very interesting, I especially enjoyed the discussion of Java generics, and the mixed review. I agree with him on both counts. They are a great addition to the language, but the implementation is not very Java-like, and increases the language complexity. This contributes to my overall feeling that Java has left the simplicity roots behind, and is becoming more like C++ as the years go by.

Reading the interview with this guy feels like reading a good book. I mean his answers are very smooth, full of meaning delivering clear message. So, it makes me to believe his books are very well written as well. I like his attitude toward programming paradigms and styles where he says that he tends not to buy into any religions! :) Joshua makes many interesting observations about programming and derives reasonable conclusions that hard not to accept. For instance, C++ complexity. I have to agree, every new C++ standard adds more complexity to the language. It was actually funny and at the same time a little sad to watch C++ standardization committee members arguing about how new features are supposed to be used after new C++11 standard release, and they rarely agreed on anything. I mean, those are people who are going to write books and teach other people the language!!…

C++ and Knuth conversations come up in every interview so far in this book. So I’m wondering:
Has anyone here read Art of Computer Programming? And if yes, what do you think?

I own the set. I consider it much more of a reference book, than one that you would read cover-to-cover. It is a definitive reference for many classic algorithms. It uses a made-up assembly language to illustrate the algorithms.

I once did a project that was heavily dependent on good quality hash tables, and this was my primary reference. It goes through exhaustive, mathematical, treatment of the many alternatives.

Overall, I think that it is a very impressive contribution, but I don't worship it as highly as some others do. For more about it, see:

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~k...