That's something we've been considering! Right now I'm wrapping up my masters degree and will finish in April (fingers crossed). Once I have more free time, we're going to look at other ways to expand the podcast, including audience participation. We've gotten that request from a few people.
I’m one of the creators of the podcast. Thanks for linking to the site!
If you’re not familiar with the podcast, we read and discuss a new software engineering book each week. When we can, we interview the authors, like we just did with Brian.
It's definitely a bit of a melancholy read. Some of the people who invented Unix are long gone, and we probably don't have a lot of time left with the people who are still with us. I'm glad Brian was able to tell the full story while there's still time left. We take Unix for granted, but its the basis of most of the modern operating system world.
You can argue that Shakespeare is comprehensible to a modern English speaker, but I don't think you can argue that it's modern English. The different "you" forms alone are enough to make it difficult to understand for most modern speakers.
Super interested in this! I left a main comment in the thread about a potential promotional opportunity for you all, so let me know if you're interested!
I love it! One of my big hesitations in using LLMs in any projects is the inherent instability of it, so I'm excited to see some concrete strategies on how to mitigate that.
Actually, I host a podcast called Book Overflow ([YouTube link here](https://www.youtube.com/@BookOverflowPod), but we're on all major platforms). Each week we read and discuss a new software engineering book. We also love to interview the authors when possible. Our [interview with Brian Kernighan](https://youtu.be/_QQ7k5sn2-o?si=bi3omgmNW7bs50NQ) actually went viral here on HN last week, peaking at #3.
If you're willing to provide us with an advance copy and one/some of the authors are willing to sit down for a digital interview, we'd love to devote a discussion episode and bonus interview episode to the book. We could even time the release to line up with the release of the book.
Let me know if you're interested. We can work out the details either here in the thread or you can reach us at contact at bookoverflow.io.
One of the great things about The Practice of Programming is how much it references other non-coding works. You can tell Kernighan draws his knowledge from many sources, not just technical ones.
Thanks for the heads up on "The Unix Programming Environment!" I've been searching for a book with a concise explanation on how to write a compiler, and you can't go wrong with one from Kernighan!
Added to the backlog! As our audience grows, we've debated doing live backlog grooming on YouTube so that listeners have a chance to chime in and voice their opinions on what we should read.
They mention at one point that Java doesn't have a way to pass a function as a parameter to another function. That was added in Java 8 with lambdas. That's just one off the top of my head.
That's been my experience so far, especially because the focus of the podcast is explicitly on the book. It's not, "Hey, come on my podcast to discuss the latest AI development and then maybe plug your book at the end," it's "Hey, come on my podcast solely dedicated to discussing the book you've written." Authors seem pretty eager to participate in that.
Sounds interesting! We're trying to figure out if we should be focusing on more modern books even if they're "unproven" or classics even if they're outdated. Sometimes reading the classics can be a lot of fun because, like you said, they serve as historical documents. As someone who started their career a lot later, it's crazy to me that GOTO used to be in style, but I suppose for it to fall out of style there had to be a book arguing against it at some point. It'd be interesting to read the original arguments!
We would have loved nothing more than to talk to him for hours. He was already calling in from England while on his vacation, so I didn't want to take any more of his time, haha!
Oh yeah, that’s a good idea. We’ll have to do that. We’ve been debating setting up Amazon affiliate links to the books in the episode descriptions. We were going to wait until we were a little bigger, but after today we might have to speed up those conversations, haha.
What do you mean by this exactly? Like a list of all upcoming books we’ll discuss? If you’re curious, you can find that on our website at www.bookoverflow.io!
Thanks for listening! Which book was it that you found?
It’s definitely a breadth over depth kind of podcast, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. We wanted it to feel like hearing two coworkers discuss a book over lunch. We don’t provide comprehensive reviews, but rather just highlight what we found the most interesting, while trying to keep it substantive.
My last interview cycle I interviewed with some big names (Stripe, Square, Shopify, etc.) and was pleased that none of them asked any LeetCode style questions. All pretty practical programming stuff. Stripe had an interview where they had forked the Jackson Java library, introduced a bug, and then asked me to find and fix it. Pretty unique style, but much more applicable to the actual job of programming.
It was the first time I’ve ever read it and I was surprised how much of it still held true given it’s 25 years old. Some of the specific programming examples are pretty outdated, but the general ideas are as solid as ever!