
Ten Challenges - b-man
http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/ten-challenges
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mixmax
I managed to get halfway through Godel Escher Bach. Glad I'm not alone in not
having finished it.

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mquander
Am I the only one who found GEB to be a _light read_? There are many books on
computer science, math, and philosophy which I have to think hard and spend a
great deal of time to absorb, but GEB was most definitely not one of them. I
know Steve Yegge is probably smarter than me, and it baffles me to hear him
describe how it is too rich and dense for him to finish. I found it fairly
playful and easy to get through, and hard to put down until I was done.

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RiderOfGiraffes
No, you're not the only one. I, and at least three people I know, all found it
to be an entertaining and fairly straight-forward read. Certainly not
unfinishable.

I'd be interested to know what it is that people find makes them stop.

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afterz
I found it light, and boring because of how light it was. I had studied
Gödel's theorems, etc., so I really could not take the pace for explaining the
logic stuff (most of the book) in GEB.

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afterz
By the way, I would recommend any programmer interested in physics "The Road
to Reality" by Penrose. I think that's a very challenging book, that can be
interesting for programmers, even if it's not about programming. Compared to
that kind of material, GEB is very, very light.

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icefox
Really for most programmers it is a list of 10 books I want to have on my
bookshelf so I look important when someone comes over. A list of ten
programing books programmers _wish_ they read.

Much more useful is the list of "... ten books that I really enjoyed, and that
I'd recommend to anyone who's a computer programmer, regardless of their
preferred language and platform."

<http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/ten-great-books>

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camccann
"Challenges" is kind of subjective. GEB is really a bit fluffy (as I said in
another comment here), and SICP is only challenging if you've never seen a
functional language before. PLP is also not particularly challenging as such,
but it is a satisfyingly informative treatment of the practicalities involved
in implementing a conventional programming language from the ground up.

On the other hand, while I've not read all of _Types and Programming
Languages_ , it definitely starts to get into some challenging (and very
interesting!) material.

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samdk
_Types and Programming Languages_ was one of the books used for my (undergrad)
programming languages course. This article made me feel much less guilty about
not actually understanding most of the small amount that we did end up
actually reading.

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llimllib
I'd certainly replace one of those with AIMA, though I'm not sure which.

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alexgartrell
Has anyone read functional data structures that can give a brief review on it?

