1st Week: Famous people! Questions! And a textbook

Slashdot reports on Jarosław "sztywny" Rzeszótko's E-mail interview with some of the greats in the computing world, including Linux creator Linus Torvalds and C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup. It's a very good read; here are my personal highlights...

- What do you think is the most important skill every programmer should possess?

Linus Torvalds:

It’s a thing I call "taste".

I tend to judge the people I work with not by how proficient they are: some people can churn out a _lot_ of code, but more by how they react to other peoples code, and then obviously by what their own code _looks_ like, and what approaches they chose. That tells me whether they have "good taste" or not, and the thing is, a person without "good taste" often is not very good at judging other peoples code, but his own code often ends up not being wonderfully good.

- Do you think mathematics and/or physics are an important skill for a programmer? Why?

Tim Bray (co-author of XML and ATOM specs):

In my case, I’ve almost never used my university-level math to support my programming.

- What is your favourite book related to computer programming?

Linus Torvalds:
I have a soft spot for Andrew Tanenbaum’s "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation". (This is on my reading list for next term! Good to know it has pedigree...)

Go, read the rest for yourself - and tell me if it was worth me doing all that Maths last year...