Ward Cunningham talks with Bill Venners about complexity that empowers versus complexity that creates difficulty, simplicity as the shortest path to a solution, and coding the simplest thing when you're stuck.

Ward Cunningham talks with Bill Venners about using the programming language, rather than the whiteboard, to design and communicate ideas.

Ward Cunningham talks with Bill Venners about the flattening of the cost of change curve, the problem with predicting the future, and the program as clay in the artist's hand.

Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of the Ruby language, talks with Bill Venners about becoming a better programmer through reading code, learning languages, focusing on fundamentals, being lazy, and considering interfaces.

Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of the Ruby programming language, talks with Bill Venners about two kinds of nameless functions in Ruby: blocks and closures.

Anders Hejlsberg, the lead C# architect, talks with Bruce Eckel and Bill Venners about the trouble with distributed systems infrastructures that attempt to make the network transparent, and object-relational mappings that attempt to make the database invisible.

Bertrand Meyer talks with Bill Venners about Design by Contract and the limits of formal languages for expressing contracts.

Ward Cunningham talks with Bill Venners about how he designed wiki to be a model for collective code ownership, collective incentives for pride of ownership, and how to deal with disagreements by eliminating the cost of making mistakes.

Bjarne Stroustrup talks with Bill Venners about using multiple inheritance and pure abstract classes, multi-paradigm programming, and the technique of resource acquisition is initialization.

Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of the Ruby programming language, talks with Bill Venners about morphing interfaces, using mix-ins, and the productivity benefits of being concise in Ruby.

James Gosling talks with Bill Venners about visualizing software designs and understanding large-scale distributed systems.

Anders Hejlsberg, the lead C# architect, talks with Bruce Eckel and Bill Venners about DLL hell and interface contracts, strong names, and the importance of interoperability.

Bertrand Meyer talks with Bill Venners about the increasing importance of software quality, the commercial forces on quality, and the challenges of complexity.

Ward Cunningham talks with Bill Venners about using wiki for collaborative exploration and the tradeoff between wiki authors and readers.