![]() ![]() “Understanding the roots of the things you’re working on unlocks a lot of knowledge that you’re not going to get purely just by using every day because you don’t understand the paths that they didn’t go down,” said Ashby. The tools that you use, from databases to programming languages, are built on a foundation of academic research. Knowing the history of the computing concepts that you use every day unlocks a lot of understanding into how they work at a practical level. ![]() That’s when the idea of Papers We Love was born. Hearing this explanation with the academic context started turning a few gears in their minds. He gave a talk there about Clojure and other Lisp-like languages, referencing a lot of John McCarthy’s early papers. Nolen was an acquaintance who worked for The New York Times. “But we need someone like David Nolen to explain this to us.” “It was like, I can’t understand half of this formalism, but maybe the intro is pretty good,” said Lakhani. When they sat down to discuss the paper, they realized they didn’t even know how to approach understanding it. They were working on Clojure and Clojurescript at the time, so this seemed relevant. In Kidder’s book, Lakhani, Newton, and Ashby saw a whole history of computer science that they had no connection with, so they decided to try reading a foundational paper: Tony Hoare’s “ Communicating Sequential Processes” from 1978. This was before the time of mass-market CPUs and standard motherboard components, so a lot of what we take for granted today was still being worked out. It covered both the engineering culture at the time and the problems and concepts those engineers wrestled with. “So I’m always interested in the historical source material for the things that I do.” Surveying historyĪs part of learning more about the history of programming, Ashby was reading Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine, about the race to design a 32-bit microcomputer in the late 70s. “I had a latent librarian inside,” said Newton. Like any good student of the humanities, they went looking for answers in the archives. All of those fields of study rely heavily on reading texts that built the foundation of the discipline as to understand the theory that underlies all practice. All three came from humanities and arts disciplines: Ashby has an English degree with a history minor, Newton went to art school twice, and Lakhani went to film school for undergrad before getting a master’s degree in music and audio engineering. They found that none of them had formal training in computer science, but they all wanted to learn more. Zeeshan Lakhani, an engineering director at BlockFi, Darren Newton, an engineering team lead at Datadog, and David Ashby, a staff engineer at SageSure, all met while working at a company called Arc90. We spoke to three of the members of the Papers We Love team, an online repository of their favorite computer science scholarship. Future innovations will be built on the research of today. Every programming feature, from the null pointer (aka the billion dollar mistake) to objects (via Smalltalk) has been built on a foundation of research that stretches back to the 1960s (and earlier). ![]() While the tutorials can help you write code right now, it’s the academic papers that can help you understand where programming came from and where it’s going. But how often do you find yourself digging into academic computer science papers to improve your programming chops? ![]() You check out tutorials, documentation, Stack Overflow questions, anything you can find that will help you write code and keep your skills current. As working programmers, you need to keep learning all the time. ![]()
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