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Imagine that someone less holy would post a list of supposedly remarkable projects in CS without mentioning McCarthy's LISP, Kay's Smalltalk, Armstrong's Erlan

Imagine that someone less holy would post a list of supposedly remarkable projects in CS without mentioning McCarthy's LISP, Kay's Smalltalk, Armstrong's Erlang, Stallman's Emacs, Cox's Plan9, git of Linus, etc. How would you react? Like in this example, these books I have mentioned are not even a matter of opinion, they are such masterpieces, without which no list could be considered worth having. You probably pissing up the wrong tree.

tehstone8 11y ago
This isn't necessarily meant to be a list of remarkable books or masterpieces. It's just the list of one person's favorite 100.
dang 11y ago
They're utterly a matter of opinion. Please stop, and please don't be uncivil on Hacker News.
- dschiptsov 11y ago
  Nope. Certain aesthetics are related to that set of hardwired emotions (as in Minsky's Emotion Machine) we call the Human Nature. The notions of youth, health, beauty, honesty, clarity, straightforwardness, etc. In software engineering there are other aesthetics. The famous maxim "for people to read and accidentally for machine to execute" sums up almost everything. Clarify, conciseness, readability, modularity, compossibility, loose coupling, design around protocols and interfaces - every decent programming guidelines, such as Google's Common LISP or Python style guides will show you a set of variables to optimize. Norvig's LISP style guide is also nice read. Like it is in arts, each genre has its own aesthetics, and there are universal ones, such as non verbosity, clarify, following standard, familiar idioms. So, some artifacts are objectively better (according to certain human-universal aesthetics or those derived from laws of complex systems of Nature) than others no matter what conditioning you have in your head. Haskell's syntax, for example, is aesthetically better than Java's no matter what opinion you, or even majority hold. Do you have sheriff's bage or something?
  - dang 11y ago
    Yes, I'm the lead moderator of HN. Sorry that wasn't clear.

tehstone8 11y ago

This isn't necessarily meant to be a list of remarkable books or masterpieces. It's just the list of one person's favorite 100.

dang 11y ago

They're utterly a matter of opinion. Please stop, and please don't be uncivil on Hacker News.

dschiptsov 11y ago
Nope. Certain aesthetics are related to that set of hardwired emotions (as in Minsky's Emotion Machine) we call the Human Nature. The notions of youth, health, beauty, honesty, clarity, straightforwardness, etc. In software engineering there are other aesthetics. The famous maxim "for people to read and accidentally for machine to execute" sums up almost everything. Clarify, conciseness, readability, modularity, compossibility, loose coupling, design around protocols and interfaces - every decent programming guidelines, such as Google's Common LISP or Python style guides will show you a set of variables to optimize. Norvig's LISP style guide is also nice read. Like it is in arts, each genre has its own aesthetics, and there are universal ones, such as non verbosity, clarify, following standard, familiar idioms. So, some artifacts are objectively better (according to certain human-universal aesthetics or those derived from laws of complex systems of Nature) than others no matter what conditioning you have in your head. Haskell's syntax, for example, is aesthetically better than Java's no matter what opinion you, or even majority hold. Do you have sheriff's bage or something?
- dang 11y ago
  Yes, I'm the lead moderator of HN. Sorry that wasn't clear.