Recommended articles/papers on the craft of programming

Question

My intention here is to have a single thread of will-make-you-a-better-programmer-just-for-reading sort of articles or papers or really standup blog posts that the writer has put in a lot of effort to distill (anything that will take you less than a day to read). I don't have the time to dig through the giant information crypts of the internet (most of the time) so if we help each other by placing beacons on the good stuff, we can all save time.

Must

• influence (or atleast cause you to examine) your perspective / outlook on programming.
• be technology-agnostic (not relevant only to a specific community of programmers).
• not be a plug for a new architecture, product or methodology.
• not tied to a specific Role that supports programming. (How to do better specs/UX/etc.)
• not make my brain hurt. Target an intermediate-to-advanced audience without assuming the reader to be a wizard at math / calculus

I see we already have 'What are the best programming articles?' and there is some amount of overlap (atleast with the first page) _ I can't find words to articulate the difference that I want to convey. I guess the emphasis is here on the 'craft' aspect.
Hope enough people find this idea to be of some use and contribute.. or it gets voted/closed down and doesn't add to the noise.

Answer 1

Peter Naur's Programming as Theory Building

Can't seem to find an online version. However this piece is published as an appendix in Alistair Cockburn's Agile Software Development: The Co-operative Game book.

Answer 2

The Mythical Man Month, while a book rather than an article, is essential.

Answer 3

The Dijkstra Archives blow me away. Most are short and can be read in less than an hour. The beauty is that many would take the rest of one's natural life to truly understand. :)

Answer 4

How to be a programmer

Is relatively short, you can easily read it in one day, and concentrates on pragmatics of the profession.

Answer 5

Although this is not an article/paper I would strongly suggest you to read:

Refactoring by Martin Fowler et al.

It makes you totally change the way you see the code. Source code is not for machines to be happy but for humans.

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. ~Martin Fowler

Answer 6

What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic is perhaps a bit too specialized, but I think it should at least be mentioned here.

Answer 7

Martin Fowler's paper on GUI Architectures. If programmers read this before conjuring up GUIs, the world would be a much better place.
I have a printout handy to come back to everytime I'm confused with MVC, MVP, MVVM and other acronyms that multiplying by the day... and the semantic diffusion thereof.