Overvaluing the "original voices" in a discipline where you don't have to is unhealthy. Take the Turing test: the important part isn't the test, it's the high-l

Overvaluing the "original voices" in a discipline where you don't have to is unhealthy. Take the Turing test: the important part isn't the test, it's the high-level idea. You can get the high level idea without reading Turing's original formulation, and that's all that matters. If you do read his original description, you'll get bogged down in details like running the test in an ESP-proof room. At the end, you'll either be more confused or, at best, not come away with a better understanding of the concepts themselves. Having read the article myself, I don't recommend except out of historical curiosity. It's not the best option to expand your understanding of CS or the philosophy of CS. The same goes for a bunch of other foundational writing. We could take a topic I'm deeply familiar with: functional programming. It's fair to say that much of it goes back to Backus, to his Turing-award speech with the catchy title "Can Programming be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?". The title is worth it, the content isn't. It was brilliant, of course, but it was just the beginning—one limited in arbitrary ways. You're better off learning functional programming as it is now than getting into Backus's FP (what he named his language) because that's a less clear and, crucially, less complete presentation of the important ideas. The language didn't even have named variables back then, it was like always writing in point-free style! Again: it's fine to read this from a historical perspective, but it's not the best way to learn functional programming and you could be a perfectly capable, insightful functional programmer without having read it. Honestly, it feels like the call to read specific works like this is just signalling that you have the "right" background and education to work in a field, which is not where we want to be. This is pretty consistent. Coming up with brilliant theories and insights is a different skill from polishing and completing them which is a different skill from presenting them well. And there's nothing wrong with benefiting from the last part of this pipeline and skipping over earlier, "historically relevant" works especially in fields like CS and math. This isn't to say that you shouldn't learn the concepts, which you probably should. But there's a big difference between "having read Shannon" and "understanding information theory", and only one of those matters.