People of ACM – Russ Cox

7 comments

• pbohun 4 hours ago
  Russ also has a great blog, with the most recent entry on fast floating-point printing and parsing. I believe these performance improvements have landed in the latest version of Go. https://research.swtch.com/fp
• dchest 6 hours ago
  I recently learned that Russ also wrote software for The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (https://oeis.org) and is the president of the OEIS Foundation.
• shaftoe444 1 day ago
  > Software engineering is what happens to programming when you add time and other people.
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  • Cthulhu_ 5 hours ago
    The book Software Engineering at Google goes into this (all factors of programming at scale / over time), worth a read.
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    • tmoertel 3 hours ago
      It's available online for free: https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book

      And, yep, it's worth a read.
  • pstuart 6 hours ago
    An amazing distillation of the craft.
  • ignoramous 4 hours ago
    Then a new term is warranted for what happens to programming when we add prompts & agents.
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    • arccy 4 hours ago
      don't we already have the words slop and vibecode
• SA9G 3 hours ago
  I love the "Tornado" term and "software debt"... worked with a few over the years, fixed the bug but broke the paradigm. Well articulated wisdom.
• pluralmonad 2 hours ago
  Cloudflare says I'm not allowed to view the page. At least they are protected from "attacks."
• fenestella 2 hours ago
  [flagged]
• Transformanshen 3 hours ago
  Solid interview but honestly a bit boilerplate in parts. The bit about "program death" and Naur's theory is gold though, even worth re-reading every few years. His take on AI feels a bit cautious though. I think he's underestimating how fast tactical tornadoes are gonna become the default just because managers love seeing shit get done fast, even if it's messy...