Peyton Jones mentions Fred Brook's paper that he reread and liked "The Computer Scientist as Toolsmith". Peter Norvig In 1972/73 when Norvig was still in high school, he found the Knuth algorithm for shuffling cards. The first interesting program that Norvig wrote was Game of Life. Wrote an essay called "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years". On practical applications of academic concepts, he mentions that part of the problem is that academics do not see the whole problem and another part is education. If you have a bunch of programmers who don't understand what a monad is and haven't taken courses in category theory, there's a gap. Books/Authors he recommends include Knuth; Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest; Sally Goldman, Abelson and Sussman, Code Complete. Knuth has written an essay about developing TeX where he talks about flipping over to his pure, destructive QA personality and doing his darnedest to break his own code. Talks about the job interview process at Google and says that the best signal is if somebody has worked with one of their employees and they can vouch for the candidate. He also talks about "resume predictor" that takes resume attributes such as experience, winning a programming contest, working on open source project etc. and predicts fit. He also mentions assigning of scores 1 to 4 by interviewers and generally turning down candidates who get a 1 by any of the interviewers unless someone at Google fights for hiring them. Guy Steele Collaborated with Gerald Sussman on a series of papers now known as "The Lambda Papers" which included the original definition of the Scheme programming language. On getting degree in Computer Science, Guy mentions that he had set out to be a pure math major but he realized that he had no intuition whatsoever for infinite dimensional Banach spaces and that's what did it for him to switch to applied math major. Favorite authors and books: Knuth; Aho, Hopcroft and Ullman (Guy says that this book is where he learned sorting for "real"), Gerald Weinberg on the Psychology of Computer Programming, Fred Brook's Mythical Man-Month Suggests that you want to design the specification of what's in the middle in such a way that it naturally is also correct on the boundaries rather than treating boundaries as special cases. A parallel garbage collector algorithm developed by Dijkstra which fit on half a page. David Gries wrote a paper