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Re:Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read at Least Tw... by notacoward on Friday December 19, 2014 @08:56PM (#8775586)
Eight out of ten are about programming languages, and strong on the functional side to boot. It's not that these topics aren't important, or that they're not great papers, but isn't that a bit too heavily skewed toward one area? Shouldn't at least one of those top ten be more directly about security, or performance, or some other kind of idea rather than the notation we use to express ideas?

Yeah, I know, make your own list. Maybe I will. Nonetheless, the author specifically mentions "cover a wide-range of topics" as a goal and this list fails to meet that goal.

Re:Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read at Least Tw... by dj-wonk on Friday December 19, 2014 @09:10PM (#8775616)
Yes, there is an emphasis (and bias!) towards functional languages and distributed systems. Yes, Fogus' intent is to raise awareness of these concepts. Yes, other people would have different lists. Yes, the list could have more breadth.

Personally, I'd like to see a concept map of essential computer science topics combined with some of the top papers and books that cover each. It could be implemented as a curated collapsable directed graph.

Re:Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read at Least Tw... by tekacs on Friday December 19, 2014 @10:05PM (#8775747)
> Personally, I'd like to see a concept map of essential computer science topics combined with some of the top papers and books that cover each. It could be implemented as a curated collapsable directed graph.

I've tried building one of these before, both for CS and for Maths. Funnily enough formatting, displaying and making it accessible (whilst retaining enough data) was the time-consuming issue, despite all the tech around for handling graphs. :/

Re:Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read at Least Tw... by seanmcdirmid on Friday December 19, 2014 @09:55PM (#8775730)
Most of us program, so programming languages is actually a fairly general supporting field for the "computer science" community when other active fields tend to be more specialized. Other general fields include systems and algorithms, which seem to be represented somewhat. In my opinion, none of these papers are must reads, but that is just an opinion :)

Disclaimer, I'm a PL researcher, but I work in a systems group.

Re:Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read at Least Tw... by zak_mc_kracken on Saturday December 20, 2014 @12:57AM (#8775978)
Good catch.

These are definitely interesting papers, especially to someone like me who has a much stronger interest in programming languages than other (admittedly essential) topics like performance and similar, but this selection is a revealing demonstration that a lot of people who are heavy into functional programming tend to think that FP is the silver bullet of software engineering and that beyond it, there's nothing really interesting worth learning (especially not OOP or other non-FP methodologies).

Re:Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read at Least Tw... by frozenport on Friday December 19, 2014 @09:06PM (#8775607)
Perhaps these 10 are among the greater set of papers that every programmer should read. I will shamelessly plug the IRLS paper on l0 optimization: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cpa.20303/abstrac...
Re:Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read at Least Tw... by DyslexicAtheist on Friday December 19, 2014 @09:11PM (#8775619)