Comment by zeroq

Joshua Bloch's work on Collections for Java2 was absolutely formative for me.

I was just starting real programming, I knew naming was hard so I was using thesaurus almost as extensively - if not more - than the reference manual.

But his work defined designing API for me for life. Stuff we take for granted, and we often overlook as seemingly trivial.

Let's say you have a collection type that has a method ``put``. It takes two arguments - an object you want to insert, and an index you want to put it at. Which argument should go first? Could index be optional? What value should it default to? Does the function returns anything? A boolean to indicate whether insertion was successful? Or the index at which the object was put? If latter how you indicate an error?

All of these seems seemingly trivial but he and his team worked on that library for over a year and he throughly documented their work in series of presentations.

And we can't forget about his java puzzlers, absolute gem.