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Alan Kay's reading list
- steveeq1 10y agoI am a particular fan of the Debono books. I swear, debono is unparalled in clear writing. Here are video versions of the two debono books mentioned in Alan Kay's reading list just in case anyone's interested: Lateral Thinking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFFZ0XSfCRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFFZ0XSfCRw Six Thinking Hats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Mtc_CBTIeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Mtc_CBTIeI
- cJ0th 10y ago"Six Thinking Hats" was the first book that I read in this area. To this day I like to use his methodology from time to time when I have to find a solution to a big problem that confuses me so much that I don't even know where to start. Even if you don't have a problem at hand applying it to a hypothetical problem is quite a fun mind game when you have some time to kill (for example on a long bus trip). That said I probably read the book at the right time because it works best when you have a certain naivete and faith that you stumbled upon the ultimate silver bullet for problem solving. Had I encountered the book just yet I'd probably have been more dismissive of it. "Oh yeah, here we go .. another guy who wants to sell you some self-help fluff disguised in a business context"
- unchocked 10y agoNote that the only book specific to computer language on there is McCarthy's Lisp manual.
- unimpressive 10y agoIf you plan to get old, invest in fundamentals. They'll be with you long after any specific implementation is dead and buried.
- signa11 10y ago> If you plan to get old, invest in fundamentals. by that account, shouldn't we all be learning mathematics ?
- unusximmortalis 10y agoMath, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, ethics and algorithms.
- marlag 10y agoCan ethics really be taught?
- unusximmortalis 10y agowhy not?
- Scarblac 10y agoLearn ecology, we are organisms that can't live without our ecosystem and we all need to be aware of what ecosystems can and can't do. Doesn't get more fundamental than that.
- akkartik 10y agoIn that spirit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fates_of_Nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fates_of_Nations (I pretty much wrote that Wikipedia page.)
- chrisallick 10y agoThat's a lot of books! I wish there were a top 5.
- alankay1 10y agoIt's a bit like the problem of comparing great composers and great music -- for example, it doesn't really make sense to try to decide whether Bach was a greater composer than Beethoven or any other great composer. Thresholds are a little better: "above the line is 'great' ", etc. But then drawing the line is tough. In this list I didn't include quite a number of books I think of as "great" -- instead I put in readable books that I thought would help the target readers. Just to pick one as an example: I think Newton's "Principia" is a great book. It's not easy to read, and it would not have been a good choice for this group, but it is above any threshold I would draw.
- johansch 10y agoIt takes a lot of work to become so pompous.
- dang 10y agoPersonal attacks aren't allowed here. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11803404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11803404 and marked it off-topic.
- V-2 10y ago[nevermind, I misread]
- maxerickson 10y agodang replied to a comment that is hidden, it isn't a reply to your comment. You can turn on showdead in your profile to see comments that have been hidden.
- V-2 10y agoOh, I see. Thanks for clearing that up. It was displayed as if it was a reply to mine - in place of the deleted comment there was just "[flagged]", but no date or anything, so it looked like a tag added to mine. This isn't most readable UI... Thanks for the showdead tip.
- dang 10y agoAs other users have pointed out, that was the fault of a usability problem at our end. It was hard to tell that a comment was replying to a flagged comment. Sorry for the confusion! This has been on our list to fix since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10917057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10917057 so I went ahead and fixed it (or tried to). Now, in addition to "[flagged]", "[dead]", or "[deleted]", you'll see the usual item line with at least a timestamp. Hopefully this will make it clear that there used to be a full comment there, to which there is a surviving reply.
- awt 10y agoI'm disappointed not to see Aristotle. On the other hand not totally surprised, either.
- andrewbinstock 10y agoKay is a huge admirer of Socrates. When I interviewed Kay in 2012, he even managed to bring Socrates into the conversation and then discourse on his worthiness in the context of various religions[1]: "You can't go to heaven unless you're baptized. If anyone deserves to go to heaven, it's Socrates, so this is a huge problem." While the link below goes to the page mentioning Socrates, I highly recommend the entire interview. Kay was in truly excellent form. [1] http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442?pgno=4 http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit...
- olavk 10y agoDante has a solution for this: There is a place in the upper section of hell with no punishment or torment, reserved for "just heathens" like Socrates. So technically he did not go to heaven since he is denied the closeness to God, but arguably this is an even nicer afterlife, since he can continue thinking and questioning things together with other great minds.
- alankay1 10y agoAnd consider that the Mormons did get Socrates into heaven (via proxy baptism!)
- morbidhawk 10y agoExmormon here, to get into VIP Heaven (highest kingdom in heaven) he also needs temple endowment and temple sealing done by proxy too (which they've probably done). Don't tell me you converted to mormonism because of this
- 10y ago
- V-2 10y agoIt's an interesting selection overall, however I couldn't help but notice that the "Politics & Economy" section looks like neither politics nor economy have ever existed anywhere but in the US : )
- msb 10y agoBookmarked this list the first time I saw it on HN seven years ago. I have been slowly working my way through it, with some personal curation, ever since. Some of my favorites: Conscientious Objections Freedom and Culture Visual Thinking Notes on a Synthesis of Form The Character of Physical Law and anything Tufte Here is the old post, with some good discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=664324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=664324
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- fuddle 10y agoThe site's not loading for me. Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_vTAtT7dpeoJ:www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_vTAtT7...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ljw1001 10y agoIt would be interesting to know what are his favorite books of the last 20 years
- scholia 10y agoWhich is a very polite way of pointing out how out of date it is ;-) I think I read most of those books they were popular, but I'm not that much younger than he is. I'm not sure I'd recommend all of them now....
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- else_nohope 10y agoWhich ones would you still recommend?
- rdl 10y agoThis could do with a short summary of the book and why Alan Kay thought it was relevant, for each, on-page, before the link to Amazon.
- alankay1 10y agoIt's not about "relevance" but about "perspectives"
- rigobert_slim 10y agoSo great to see Neil Postman and Marshal Mcluhan on the top, as well as Joseph Campbell and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the middle Essential reading for a world that usually promotes taking media for granted.
- advertising 10y agoThe inner game of tennis is an awesome quick read.
- jph 10y agoMindstorms by Papert transformed my understanding of how to program, and how to teach programming. The book discusses how children acquire mental models of computers and logical processes. And it turns out that the book is growing even more relevant with the rapid growth of Lego Mindstorms -- which is a direct result Papert's projects and related MIT Media Lab projects. What is most exciting, to me, is the direct links from the Mindstorms book to the rise of hobby micro-controllers such as the Arduino, BeagleBone, Raspberry Pi, and others, as well as the "Internet of Things" meme and similar kinds of home automation projects and home robotics projects.
- Dangeranger 10y agoMindstorms is truly a transformational text. It's very sad that Papert's brain injury sustained in Hanoi resulted in him needing to use some of the same techniques that he developed in the text to aid in his personal rehabilitation and recovery.
- paloaltokid 10y agoI don't think it's necessarily a sad thing. It's of course a sad event for anyone to sustain a brain injury. But if he used his own techniques and they provably lead to recovery, it should be a moment of joy and triumph. His work was not wasted and he helped himself - what could be better than that?
- madebylaw 10y agoI love Kay and you should absolutely read any of his recommendations or at least examine them with earnest. That said, I struggle to remember anything he's created or written that's moved the needle (my needle). I'm honestly not hating and I have way too much respect for him to say anything on this list is not worthwhile. But, in my experience, Kay has been one of those brilliant uncles who's (written) work never seems to approach the peripheries of my (self-guided) computer science study (or main stream relevance?). Obviously I've heard of and studied him but if you asked me at a bar "madebylaw is alan kay still relevant in computer science?"
- madebylaw 10y agoOuch, why did I say anything. Feel like a hater :-/
- jeffdavis 10y agoIt might have been better phrased as a question. What do you mean by "still relevant to computer science"? EDIT: from a brief read of his wikipedia page: "Kay has lectured extensively on the idea that the computer revolution is very new, and all of the good ideas have not been universally implemented." Coming from someone with multiple major accomplishments (OOP pioneer, smalltalk, overlapping window GUI, etc.), that's a powerful message that can still be applied today.
- internaut 10y agoMy thought is essentially a synthesis of Kay and Thiel. Namely; much of the low hanging fruit has been ignored and much of the world is in a technological stagnation. Separately they could be made to sound pessimistic, but together there is much reason for optimism.
- pjmlp 10y agoYes, because we are yet to achieve a mainstream way of doing computing the way he and his peers have envisioned. Although my IDEs are quite powerful, they are yet far from the Xerox PARC workstations experience used to feel like. My tablet, even a Surface, aren't as easy to use or programmable in the same way as the Dynabooks were envisioned. So yes, he is still relevant, because mainstream computing is still catching up to his vision.
- zcmncbv 10y agoGreat list but I'm surprized about the De Bono books. Edward De Bono is a great story-teller, but there's little science in his work and while he describes many instances of creative thought, he never shows the underlying mechanisms with any rigor.
- tamana 10y agoThat's lines up with Kay perfectly.
- chroth 10y agoIt's a good list, but might just be a bit too androcentric with only 5 women out of the ~90 persons listed, (including anthologies.) Counting: Hannah Arendt, Maria Montessori, Mary Midgley, Sylvia Scribner and Rebecca West.
- unusximmortalis 10y agoCan you pls explain the downvote when you do it please?
- mrweasel 10y agoI don't know about you, but I never check the gender of the author when picking up a book. Your comment suggest that Alan Kay deliberately discarded books written by women, and I find that hard to believe.
- munificent 10y ago> I never check the gender of the author when picking up a book. That's probably true, and that's good. However, that doesn't mean that the author's gender doesn't influence the work itself. You are not deliberately opting into skewing the data yourself, but you are still consuming a biased input set. > Your comment suggest that Alan Kay deliberately discarded books written by women, and I find that hard to believe. I don't think that's the case. I think it's just the more value-free observation that "this set of data points is biased." It doesn't state why it is, just that it is. That might be relevant to someone who expects the list to reflect a certain distribution of perspectives.
- nabla9 10y agoWhat is the persentage of scientific books is written by women? I think I have the same ratio in my bookshelf. More interesting the subject is for me, less women. For example: I have ~50 computer science books and only one is written by a woman (Sonya E. Keene).
- alankay 10y agoThis wasn't actually for my students, and dates back to the early 90s. A number of people at Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) asked for my "top ten" books. This is not possible for anyone who reads extensively, so I came out with that list as a bare start. I should mention that reading lots of "poor books" is also part of literacy: they help the understanding and appreciation of "good books" considerably.
- technofiend 10y agoWith your caveat that it is a point-in-time recommendation, perhaps you'd like to throw out an updated list?
- alankay 10y agoI think there are any number of lists that would help getting started. The basic results are "multiple perspectives" and the sense that not all perspectives are equally powerful for given contexts. That list was for adult "business people". One would come up with other lists for children, etc. An important idea about reading is that part of the pleasure (maybe even more than that) is one's choice of "this book, now". I had read many hundreds of books a year by the time I got to high school, but I balked at reading books chosen for me in a class. I suggested instead that the classes deal with themes and that there should be several thousand good books in the library that students could choose for themselves. This would make the discussions of the themes quite interesting, etc. But no go, so I wound up -- for their chosen books only -- reading "Classic Comics" like most of the rest of the students (I did get around to reading the "chosen books" later in life.) The approach of lots of books and themes was used by Mortimer Adler in putting together "The Great Books of the Western World" (now 60 of them). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor... Besides these books he picked 102 "Great Ideas", wrote an essay on each one, cross indexed the ideas through the "Great Books", and published the essays as the two volume "Syntopicon". In this sense, the reading list I came up with for Anderson Consulting was too short -- it wasn't a decent library size. And this is true of the "Great Books": it's too short as well. Another idea is the "Oxbridge" approach: pick "4" important as orthogonal as possible large subjects, and go deep on them until they meet in "the good stuff". Simplest heuristic: read a lot.
- sparky1990 10y agoI'm surprised there is nothing by Montessori. Seems a natural given the works by Piaget and Vygotsky. The Absorbant Mind would be an obvious pick.
- alankay1 10y agoYes, the first two or three books by Montessori would be on this list if I'd been comprehensive enough. I don't remember whether I listed Suzuki's "Nurtured By Love" book: another classic for those trying to think about learning, children, art, culture, environment, etc.
- alankay1 10y agoIn checking, I see that there is a Montessori book listed, as well as the book by Suzuki ...
- Bilestoad 10y agoSo there is. My mistake. Secret of Childhood is a good one. Montessori anticipated the whole 'the brain exists to control movement' awakening that is happening in developmental cognitive neuroscience, and her work caused me to question the relevance of technology in an early learning environment. This is a great book list. I was delighted to see De Bono there, who I'd forgotten about since I first discovered him years ago. May have to reread some of that.
- wowsig 10y agoI've been making lists out of book recommendations from Reddit. Adding this list and all the other books on www.shelfjoy.com
- embarcadero 10y agoDo you read on paper, tablet, phone, or all of the above? What do you think about the respective merits of these?
- alankay1 10y agoI did a lot of work at PARC on the design of readable fonts, and a few years later on reading from a display (CRT) using a super-good eye tracker we had. This was prompted by "bad feelings" when trying to read from displays. The displays are better today, but I still have "bad feelings" (somewhat different) from reading from various kinds of displays, even including eInk ones. It's partly "movement" and partly memory, so I always print out to read when I can. (This is a disappointment to say the least.)
- embarcadero 10y agoThanks. I tried to go all digital a few years ago -- getting rid of nearly all my 1000+ paper books -- only to conclude I'm generally better off reading paper and nearly always better off reading important things on paper. This because paper has a higher barrier to entry (I think of it as "slow information"), because the cookie-cutter sizing of tablets and ereaders screws up sizing (of code in particular) and, frankly, because I get tired of looking at screens and struggle to resist context switching. That said, I like to have an electronic copy of everything for easy referencing and corpus work. The subject of paper vs digital is of particular interest to me because I volunteer with www.savenypl.org, a group created to thwart the NYPL's efforts to gut the stacks at the 42nd Street Library and sell of two branch libraries (we succeeded, mostly). I am not as skeptical of keeping books off site as some of our members, but I think many libraries are misguided in their rush to remove paper books, for reasons of both reading efficacy and surveillance. I know many technologists share these concerns. Richard Stallman was kind enough to help a few years ago (https://stallman.org/save-the-nypl.html https://stallman.org/save-the-nypl.html). Now it would be good to have additional technical people weigh in on the issue of digitization / paper book removal. May I add you to the list of such people and / or keep you posted?
- 10y ago
- tamana 10y agoMindstorms, the quintessential Kay book in that list, links to the wrong amazon page, Ghost in the Machine, ironic.
- alankay1 10y agoThere seems to be a depth limit on replies: too bad. Also, I wonder if there is a provision (perhaps in a "preferences" section I don't know about) to have an email sent when someone replies (this is a very limited format for an open-ended exchange ...)
- michael_nielsen 10y agoIt's not a depth limit. Rather, mods noticed that many deep threads were flame wars, and implemented a short delay before you can post in deep threads. At least, that's my understanding. To see replies, click on "Threads" at the top of the page. I don't know if there is any standard way of getting an email notification.
- adamnemecek 10y agoYou can sign up here to get email notifications http://www.hnreplies.com http://www.hnreplies.com Also do you have a favorite piece of software?
- alankay1 10y agoThanks very much! Good question, but I don't have a good answer (perhaps too much of an idealist ...)
- adamnemecek 10y agoNo problem. You should setup a Twitter or a blog or something. But I'm sure I'm not the first person to suggest this. Or even better write a book.
- reubano 10y agoI thought hn prevented dupe link submissions. Im glad this slipped by since I missed the other ones. But how did it slip by in the first place?
- fogus 10y agoIt seems I've missed the boat on this discussion, but I wanted to say that I appreciate the context in which the list was created and the choices in that light. In other words, this list is a thoughtful attempt to educate people of a certain bent via "constrained breath" -- not the greatest term, but the best one that comes to mind. I've been trying to put together a list in the same spirit for some time aimed at programmers, systems thinkers, etc. with varying degrees of success. The current list can be described as "books for programming that are not about programming" containing such gems as How Buildings Learn, Pattern Recognition, Living System, Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers, and others. I suspect Dr. kay would have a lot to say about (and perhaps add to) such a list.