
Alan Kay's answer to ‘what are some forgotten books programmers should read?’ - enkiv2
https://www.quora.com/Experienced-programmers-and-computer-scientists-what-are-some-really-old-or-even-nearly-forgotten-books-you-think-every-new-programmer-should-read/answer/Alan-Kay-11?share=1
======
khazhou
These reading lists are lovely and promise a Better You, but I'll propose the
following challenge:

* If you're at home, turn around and look at the bookshelf you've already accumulated. Did you really read all those books you so looked forward to when you first bought them? Or do you remember all the best bits from your favorite ones? Be honest now... the unbroken spine on your Godel Escher Bach suggests otherwise. Read what you have, before stressing on Kay's or others' lists!

* If you're at work, have you read all the wiki/docs/etc created by your team and neighboring teams? Do you understand the full architecture and implementation of the system you work with every day? Go read that, level up and become the most knowledgeable person on your team.

~~~
narnianal
Sadly 99% of the code that's written nowadays can be directly thrown away. I
propose another challenge: Learn the actual meaningful stuff. E.g. how to code
in lisp. Really learn it. You will never code lisp in your job. Promised. But
in almost every task you will find that you reuse what you learned.

Or learn the architecture of git. How many people write bullshit around git
because they don't understand that git can already do 100x of what their shell
script or UI tool or plugin can do....

Don't waste your time with what is hip and instead learn how things really
work. Real things. Don't learn the latest javascript framework, but learn the
difference between class based inheritance and prototypal inheritance. Don't
learn the hippest UI IDE, learn vim or emacs. Really learn it, e.g. how to
solve almost all problems in vim without any plugins.

And one last point about "read all the content your team created". Not sure
how big your teams are, but in many companies that's impossible. If you spend
12h of reading 7 days a week you can't read all the content that is created in
that week. But you know that the cool_library that replaces the AwesomeLibrary
is just as bad at solving the problem and both actually don't even know what
the problem is.

~~~
BeetleB
>Don't waste your time with what is hip

Wouldn't that apply to git? You can probably get 90-95% of the benefit of git
using mercurial with a fraction of the effort in learning. Life is too short
to spend learning the internals of one version control system.

This idea of "Don't waste time on X focus on more valuable Y" has no real end.
Don't waste your non-work time on learning computing related stuff and instead
spend time on social connections and physical fitness first. Pays off way more
than emacs, git, vim, lisp, or programming paradigms. See how easy it is to
make such pronouncements?

~~~
MaxBarraclough
> You can probably get 90-95% of the benefit of git using mercurial with a
> fraction of the effort in learning.

You absolutely cannot.

Even if we pretend that Mercurial is simply outright better than Git, there's
a lot of value in learning Git specifically, as it's what most development
teams use. Employers value proficiency in Git. If you mention your Mercurial
proficiency in an interview, it's likely to be scored up as _cute but
irrelevant_.

If you always work alone, sure, Mercurial might work great for you, but the
real value of these version-control systems is in enabling _teams_ to work
effectively. Most teams these days use Git, so you need to know Git.

(Of course, if your team does use Mercurial, you'd better become proficient in
Mercurial.)

> Life is too short to spend learning the internals of one version control
> system.

I agree that learning the intimate internals of Git's codebase isn't something
that's likely to pay off in the day job, but short of that, Git's 'useful
skill-ceiling' is pretty high.

> Don't waste your non-work time on learning computing related stuff and
> instead spend time on social connections and physical fitness first.

Depends on your working situation. If your work offers no opportunity to learn
new skills, and you don't want your CV to get stale, you have little choice.

~~~
BeetleB
>there's a lot of value in learning Git specifically, as it's what most
development teams use. Employers value proficiency in Git. If you mention your
Mercurial proficiency in an interview, it's likely to be scored up as cute but
irrelevant.

Given that the person I was responding to was advocating _not_ spending time
on things for the reason that employers are looking for them, and is
advocating things almost no workplace uses, I find your comment strange.
Perhaps you should be responding to the comment I'm responding to?

>Depends on your working situation. If your work offers no opportunity to
learn new skills, and you don't want your CV to get stale, you have little
choice.

You do have a choice, and you made your choice. In the US, in this era, SW
professionals are near the top when it comes to freedom to change jobs and
change locations. When I know several people who make half of what I do, are
relatively unskilled, and have to work much longer hours than I do, who made a
very clear choice in favor of physical fitness and social relations, I am not
going to claim I don't have a choice.

Having said that, this is all orthogonal to my point, which was how easy it is
to make (reasonable) lists of things one should focus on that are almost
exclusive to one another.

------
steveeq1
Somewhat unrelated but here is Bret Victor's reading list for anyone that's
interested:
[https://gist.github.com/nickloewen/10565777](https://gist.github.com/nickloewen/10565777)

alan kay is a big fan of his.

The depressing things about reading lists is that it's hard to go through all
of them. Many of the books list (SICP) take a long time to wade through, read,
and program the examples. They are not "light reading".

~~~
HiroshiSan
SICP also requires a fair bit of Mathematical maturity which threw me off when
I tried to go through it.

~~~
dmix
That’s not quite true, I remember going through SICP easily before I learned
post-high school math (which included relearning some basic algebra) when I
went on my own self guided CS course. The lectures on YouTube are particularly
accessible to newbies too with basic math and programming knowledge.

~~~
steveeq1
Did you do the problem sets? The book makes a lot of references to make
theorems and number theory that the average laymen wouldn't understand.

~~~
arthev
It doesn't. There's a few math heavy exercises in the first chapter, and the
math is generally explained as it goes along too. Except for the first
chapter, it's pretty math-free.

------
nabla9
I have read "Lisp 1.5 Programmers Manual”, “The Mythical Man-Month” and “The
Meta-Object Protocol” by Kiczales. These all are definitely timeless classics.

These quotes about Gregor Kiczales and AspectJ
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AspectJ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AspectJ)
are good intro to MOP:

"In Lisp, if you want to do aspect-oriented programming, you just do a bunch
of macros and you're there. In Java, you have to get Gregor Kiczales to go out
and start a new company, taking months and years and try to get that to work.
Lisp still has the advantage there, it's just a question of people wanting
that." \-- Peter Norvig

"I am reminded of Gregor Kiczales at ILC 2003 displaying some AspectJ to a
silent crowd, pausing, then plaintively adding, "When I show that to Java
programmers they stand up and cheer." \-- Kenny Tilton

~~~
jimbokun
Agreed, and I also think "annotation oriented programming" has become the bane
of Java programmers everywhere.

Seems simple when you first slap an annotation onto a class or method. But God
help you when it stops working and you actually have to debug what it's doing.
Figuring out what code is actually executing and what it's doing seems nigh
impossible.

(Which is all to say, Lisp is still far superior, because there is a
straightforward process for figuring out what kind of code a macro will
generate, or to run a macro and look at its output. Macros can become complex
and convoluted, but that's still nothing to the mess that annotations in
modern Java frameworks create.)

~~~
therealdrag0
You can debug an aspect too eh? Throw a breakpoint before a method call, step
into it, "oh I'm in a proxy now" step step "oh I'm in this forgotten point cut
I made 6 months ago, okay now I know." _I have no exp with Lisp so not arguing
just observing the one side of exp I have._

~~~
jimbokun
But you inadvertently reinforce the point I am trying to make.

There is no way to reason about the code without actually running it. You can
not read the code and understand what it's going to do.

------
ericmcer
Does anyone else get scared that too much breadth will stifle them? CS is a
massive field these days and you could easily sink all your time into a small
area without fully mastering it. I have had coworkers before and who could
speak at length about different Linux distros, networking, web dev, dbs etc.
but then were not great at the meat and potatos of the job.

~~~
jimbokun
The books recommended by Kay here are very much about DEPTH, not BREADTH.

The majority of programming books are just ephemera and arcana and details
that will be irrelevant in a year, or next month when the new version of the
framework comes out.

Kay points to books, like the original Lisp Programming Manual, that will help
you understand deep core concepts about computing itself, that will remain
applicable no matter what framework or library you need to use tomorrow.

Take an Alan Kay, a McCarthy, Norvig, Abelson, Sussman, Armstrong, Steele,
etc. from their prime and drop them into a software company where they have
zero familiarity with the programming languages or tools currently being used,
and within days or weeks they will be the most productive developer at that
company by far. They will come up with simple, elegant, high performance and
correct solutions to problems none of the other developers would have even
considered.

Those are the kinds of thinkers you want to emulate, if you really want to
write excellent software solving real problems in the shortest amount of time.

~~~
neilv
It doesn't even have to be "from their prime" (and I don't like to encourage
that ageism concept, now that we have hiring managers fresh out of school).
I'm comfortable asserting that, at any age, they will probably be high-value,
having enough background to have insights and see connections that others
cannot yet, now with a lot of general wisdom besides. See Danny Hillis's
writeup on Feynman at Thinking Machines. You'd just need to offer them a
compelling work situation, with problems that interest them.

~~~
jimbokun
Heh, true, I just added "from their prime" because I know not all of them are
still alive so would not add much to a development team in their current
state.

~~~
yitianjian
You never know, something like "The Hand of Alan Turing" might be a fairly
decent draw for hiring

~~~
davidw
I'm totally picturing The Hand treated like a relic in some Italian church,
along these lines:

[https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/st-anthonys-
tongue](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/st-anthonys-tongue)

------
AlexeyBrin
A PDF version of the first recommended book _Lisp 1.5 Programmer 's Manual_:

[http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/book/LISP%...](http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/book/LISP%201.5%20Programmers%20Manual.pdf)

~~~
criddell
Thanks for posting this link. I'd never heard of softwarepreservation.org
before and now I can see I'm not going to get a lot done today.

~~~
jimbokun
Of course you will get a lot done, just none of what you intended to do! :)

------
kthejoker2
My own humble suggestions - although the books are hardly forgotten. But I
think people focus a lot on technical / engineering books, and very little on
design / user experience / human behavior, which arguably contribute much more
to the overall impressions end users have of programmers' work.

First, the greatest book of all time, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin -
an amazingly introspective and insightful look into how to live an examined
life and improve oneself.

And then if you want to learn lower-case "design thinking", my top 10 books

* Design for Everyday Things - duh. I re-read chunks of it all the time.

* Tufte - hard to pick one, I might actually be iconoclastic and go with Visual Explanations which I think has more to offer programmers over pure data visualization. Again, just grab one every day, flip through 3-4 pages, rinse, repeat.

* User Story Mapping - Extremely memorable book - it gives you a pretty clear field guide on prioritization, empathy, communication ... just a great book.

* Badass by Kathy Sierra - I flip through this book again and again. It is gospel truth about what motivates humans.

* The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design - IDEO's most practical book. (Close second: Designing Interactions.)

* Universal Methods of Design - another deeply practical book, lots of good tips and examples.

* Universal Principles of Design - Sister book to the Universal Methods. Again, straightforward, flip to any page and get an idea when you're brainstorming.

* Thinking in Systems - I recommend you skim this book through, but come back to it a lot, it grows with you.

* Inspired by Marty Cagan - again, love nuts and bolts process books.

* Don't Make Me Think! - still a classic, still see these mistakes being made all the time in modern app dev.

~~~
shmulkey18
> Design for Everyday Things

Do you mean "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman? If so, I agree that
it is a great book.

------
namelosw
Joe Amstrong had a related talk 'A Guide for the Perplexed'[0] last year. He
mentioned several 'forgotten great ideas' such as Linda Tuple Spaces, Flow-
based programming, Xanadu and Unix pipes.

[0] [https://youtu.be/rmueBVrLKcY?t=1949](https://youtu.be/rmueBVrLKcY?t=1949)

~~~
decebalus1
Hah.. My BSc thesis (>15 yrs ago) was around Linda Tuple Spaces... Good times.

------
DonHopkins
Probably not on Alan Kay's list, but Leo Brodie's Thinking Forth was mind
blowing and game changing!

[http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/](http://thinking-
forth.sourceforge.net/)

~~~
emmanueloga_
What is a good Forth implementation to follow along with this book?

~~~
jonsen
Take the book as a specification, then make your own Forth implementation.

Edit: Starting Forth also by Brodie would probably be a better “spec” for
implementing a Forth.

~~~
emmanueloga_
Cool, "Starting Forth" is available for free on forth.com!

Makes me curious about SwiftForth [1]. I saw a bunch of other commercially
available forth implementations in the past ([2] ?), but since Forth looks so
niche I never got motivated enough to try Forth more seriously.

1: [https://www.forth.com/swiftforth/](https://www.forth.com/swiftforth/)

2: [https://8th-dev.com](https://8th-dev.com)

------
NegatioN
Coming from Alan Kay i definitely need to check these out. If I'd read this
post a year ago I would have known almost none of the authors, but after
reading "Hackers: the heroes of the computer revolution" earlier, these are
all names that stood out right away.

Both Minsky and McCarthy seem like almost mythical figures in the book, and I
don't think I could ever hold aa candle to them, but the next best thing is
probably to understand their thinking. I think it's a bit easy for us to get
caught up in the medium blog posts detailing a small segment of a new
framework, when what we really ought to do to grow, is go back to the basics
and understand them in-depth.

~~~
mikekchar
Another great book by Minsky is Perceptrons. It's really short to boot, IIRC.
It is an especially good book for those interested in ML. In it Minsky shows
that single layer neural nets can not compute all problems. I remember that he
has a caveat somewhere that he hasn't thought about multi-layer neural nets
and they they may still be interesting. So great was the impact of this that
hardly anyone worked on neural nets for something like a decade afterwards.
But it's a brilliant book presented in a really simple style. It's a piece of
history, I think.

~~~
AndrewOMartin
I read it fairly recently, and I agree that it is both great and short.

Regarding multi-layer neural nets Minsky says they're uninteresting as they
could be declared with enough complexity to basically reimplement any existing
logic circuit. What made multi-layer neural nets interesting again was a
multi-layer training algorithm.

There another interesting part, shortly after showing that single-layer neural
nets can't implement the XOR function, Minsky shows that all that's required
for a single-layer neural net to implement the XOR function is to add another
column to the training set with specific values, effectively encoding the
hidden layer back into the training set.

------
mcaruso
> The way to grow from this book is to deeply learn what they did and how they
> did it, and then try to rewrite page 13 in a number of ways. How nicely can
> this be written in “a lisp” using recursion. How nicely can this be written
> without recursion? (In both cases, look ahead in the book to see that Lisp
> 1.5 had gotten to the idea of EXPRs and FEXPRs (functions which don’t eval
> their arguments before the call — thus they can be used to replace all the
> “special forms” — do a Lisp made from FEXPRs and get the rest by definition,
> etc.).

Found it ironic that in a comment about Lisp, Kay forgot to balance his
parens. :)

~~~
kgwxd
He knew someone would comment on it and use a smiley emoji.

------
EdwardCoffin
His longer reading list:
[http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp](http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp)

~~~
everybodyknows
Not a superset of OP -- only five titles under "Computing".

------
aj7
Fisher's thesis here:
[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/237f/33308e8e9dc794e5630764...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/237f/33308e8e9dc794e56307649155e6aa7a5882.pdf)

------
sg0
My adviser had suggested me a fantastic book for bedside reading -
"Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing" by David Harel
([https://www.amazon.com/Algorithmics-Spirit-Computing-
David-H...](https://www.amazon.com/Algorithmics-Spirit-Computing-David-
Harel/dp/0321117840)).

~~~
emmanueloga_
I discovered this book by looking for more information on state charts vs
state machines. Harel writing also got me interested in Topology:

"Topological features are a lot more fundamental than geometric ones, in that
topology is a more basic branch of mathematics than geometry in terms of
symmetries and mappings. One thing being inside another is more basic than it
being smaller or larger than the other, or than one being a rectangle and the
other a circle. Being connected to something is more basic than being green or
yellow or being drawn with a thick line or with a thin line." [1]

1: [http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2342](http://lambda-the-
ultimate.org/node/2342)

------
deepaksurti
The Lisp 1.5 Programmer's Manual listed by Kay is available for download from
the Computer Museum archives [1].

More Lisp fun [2].

[1]
[http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/book/LISP%...](http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/book/LISP%201.5%20Programmers%20Manual.pdf)

[2]
[http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP](http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP)

------
numbsafari
I love that Joe Armstrong's PhD thesis is on this list. I have it on my
reading list for junior engineers. It's incredibly accessible and the mental
model is very powerful.

~~~
saberience
Yeah, how accessible is a 295 page PhD thesis where half of it is Erlang
specific for junior engineers? Unless you want them to quit their jobs, or
complain to their friends what a crap manager they have.

~~~
numbsafari
Relax. Nobody said it was a mandatory reading list. There are no tests. It's a
suggested reading list that I pull from depending on context. Joe's thesis is
incredibly accessible.

At least two of my items were on Alan Kay's list. The other being "The
Mythical Man Month", especially the edition with the "No Silver Bullet"
article, which a depressing number of people in our industry seem to not have
read. So I don't feel like I'm too far off the mark.

------
doc_gunthrop
I've been meaning to read The Mythical Man-Month and found it's freely
available online:
[https://archive.org/details/mythicalmanmonth00fred](https://archive.org/details/mythicalmanmonth00fred)

~~~
teachrdan
This is a great companion to "The Goal" and "The Phoenix Project," both of
which use fictional narratives to illustrate best engineering practices in the
context of saving a (fictional) business.

[https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-
Improvement/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-
Improvement/dp/0884271951/)

[https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-
Busine...](https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-
Business/dp/1942788290)

------
higherkinded
I'd also like to point out that the majority of software engineers nowadays
lacks the mathematical background, so it's probably worth including
theoretical books like Abstract Algebra by Dummit and Foote on the 'must read'
list.

------
minsight
Meta II by Dewey Schorre

[http://www.ibm-1401.info/Meta-II-schorre.pdf](http://www.ibm-1401.info/Meta-
II-schorre.pdf)

~~~
carapace
> How could you combine this with Val Shorre’s “Meta II” programmatic parser
> to make a really extensible language?

At VPRI (Kay's research institute) they did this: COLA. (See also STEPS.)

[http://www.vpri.org/](http://www.vpri.org/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLA_(software_architecture)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLA_\(software_architecture\))

[http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf](http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf)
"STEPS Toward the Reinvention ofProgramming, 2012 Final Report"

------
steveeq1
Not a book, but I encourage people to read Douglas Engelbart's paper on
Augmenting Human Intellect:
[http://dougengelbart.org/content/view/138](http://dougengelbart.org/content/view/138)

Alan kay is a big of Engelbart and I'm surprised it wasn't listed in his
answer. Also, for anyone that's interested, a windows clone of NLS is
available here for windows:
[http://www.ndma.com/resources/ndm8543.htm](http://www.ndma.com/resources/ndm8543.htm)

Minus the "journal", many of the multi-user capabilities, and the "compiler
compiler" programming system of NLS. still, it's interesting to play with.

------
postit
Grab programming pearls, read it cover-to-cover (and try the exercises
please), collect all the references, read it all.

------
verisimilitudes
I can see the n-gate.com entry now:

Alan Kay recommends some books. The Hacker News spend most of the thread
recommending books they like, instead.

Anyway, this is a nice list filled with works I've not read, so I'll make
certain to give them some attention next time I'm at a book store and ask them
to order some things, since they only carry magazines and other drivel in-
store.

------
dmix
> It starts with a version of John’s first papers about Lisp, and develops the
> ideas in a few pages of examples to culminate on page 13 with Lisp eval and
> apply defined in itself. There are many other thought provoking ideas and
> examples throughout the rest of the book.

Sounds like the MIT SICP course from the 1980s using scheme!

------
Animats
An old comment on McCarthy's LISP 1.5 manual: "This is the source of the
opinion that LISP is hard."

------
robomartin
Threaded Interpretive Languages: Their Design and Implementation

[https://www.amazon.com/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages-
Desig...](https://www.amazon.com/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages-Design-
Implementation/dp/007038360X)

------
ozychhi
Probably controversial, but eelco dolstra's PhD thesis was eye opening for me.

~~~
sedachv
Agreed. IMO the most significant work in system administration in the past 20
years.

[https://nixos.org/~eelco/pubs/phd-
thesis.pdf](https://nixos.org/~eelco/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf)

------
senorflor
Found a great set of slides about early practice vs theory disputes (and their
resolution via the mathematical study of PLs, programs, and their semantics)
that I found ~looking for pdfs of one of the books Kay mentions: Advances in
Programming and Non-Numerical Computation~ I mean searching the internet:

[https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/strachey100/slides/2-JS.pdf](https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/strachey100/slides/2-JS.pdf)

------
Ericson2314
Glad to see him mention Peter Landin
([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Landin](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Landin)).
As a user and developer of functional programming languages,
[https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Landin66.pdf](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Landin66.pdf)
is my favorite paper of all time.

------
justinmeiners
Computation: Finite and Infinite is one of my favorite books. It's fascinating
to see computation built up from the theory of neural networks. Marvin Minsky
is just such a deep thinker and writer.

For those who are interested I made the neural net system into a simulator:

[https://justinmeiners.github.io/neural-nets-
sim/](https://justinmeiners.github.io/neural-nets-sim/)

~~~
steveeq1
Arrggh, I don't think it's published anymore. And used ones are over $100 on
amazon.

~~~
justinmeiners
yeah its out of print. find it online or get it from a library

~~~
yesenadam
Download links here:

[http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=Computation+Finite+and+...](http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=Computation+Finite+and+Infinite)

------
kazinator
I wouldn't recommend the Lisp 1.5 manual, other than for historic reference in
the context of learning about Lisp as it exists today.

If that is too new, then, for pete's sake, at least study 1986 Lisp; no need
to go back to 1962.

Books from the mid to late 80's, like Wilensky's _Common LISPCraft_ are
decently useful.

Just like I wouldn't tell someone to read the 1978 first edition of the
Kernighan and Ritchie C book.

------
enriquto
It is not exactly a "book", but I have found HAKMEM to be an invaluable source
of knowledge.

------
dustfinger

      Assembly Language Step-by-Step
      second edition
      Programming with DOS and Linux
      Copyright © 2000 by Jeff Duntemann
      Rev. ed. of: Assembly language, © 1992
      ISBN 0-471-37523-3

------
wenham
The Mythical Man-Month is a classic, not just for CS.

------
jshowa3
People don't read books anyways anymore. It's all audio books and videos now.

However, people like to claim that what I said above is reading a book.

------
neilwilson
Now I've been at this game several decades I've probably got just about enough
experience to really get some value out of Lisp.

------
zanethomas
Computation: Finite And Infinite Machines was my first introduction to
computing. It is the only book I still have.

------
carapace
Ted Nelson "Dream Machines"

------
caiocaiocaio
Why on Earth is Alan Kay on Quora?

~~~
pchristensen
He is very accessible, concerned about preserving knowledge from a previous
generation of computing, and not worried about his brand of self promotion. So
he goes where interesting discussions are happening - he has been on HN a
number of times (user
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alankay1](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alankay1),
AMA -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939851))

I met him at a conference 10 years ago - I basically blew off the whole
conference to sit at his feet in the lobby while he told stories and shared
pearls. There were 3-4 of us, probably 30-40 years younger than him, and we
were all nobodies, but he didn't care. One of my favorite experiences ever.

~~~
teddyh
> _I basically blew off the whole conference to sit at his feet in the lobby_

This implies that _he_ also blew off the whole conference. I wonder why he did
that.

> _There were 3-4 of us, probably 30-40 years younger than him, and we were
> all nobodies_

I would hope that this isn’t the reason. Being famous and “holding court” like
this is probably addictive.

------
nickdothutton
Software Creativity 1st Edition (1995) by Robert L. Glass.

