7 ms·

Alan Kay's reading list

144 points by wowsig 10y ago

Kenji 10y ago
When I look at this list, I see many books that look very interesting. This seems like exactly the way to look at life which I like. However, I can't read books anymore. I just find it impossible to sit down and keep my nose in front of a book for an hour or two. I am so accustomed to reading texts with vast amounts of information density about precisely the things I need or I am interested in (usually, I find such articles on the internet) that I cannot sustain the motivation to read an entire book anymore (not to mention, reading takes intellectual resources which are valuable and assigned to other tasks). Does anyone know that feeling and what do you do about it?
- wowsig 10y ago
  I think a lot of people would say yes to that feeling. Reading is a mentally taxing activity and thats exactly why it is required. I'd say books are like a huge piece of argument for a stance and it really pays well to understand things deeply. There are means of achieving reading without any reading too. Have you tried audio books? I haven't, my mind drifts too much in audio books, but some friends swear by them.
  - Kenji 10y ago
    I love audio books, but it's not fast enough and it's harder to revisit parts that you didn't quite understand or really liked. Also, it depends a lot on the speaker and whether they themselves understand what they are reading. Not to mention, some matters like, say, the description of algorithms and data structures, are really unfit to be presented with audio books. Still, audio books are nice.
- jwhite 10y ago
  Yes, I've noticed that about myself too. Reading is a high investment / high reward activity, and you have to make an effort to do it. One approach is to set aside a time slot daily where you just read, like the hour before bed time for example. You could also set goals for your self (e.g. read a book a week, a chapter a night, etc.) but that might turn it into a chore and make it less likely that you'll stick with it. It depends on your personality I suppose. I've also noticed that reading in the office attracts strange looks sometimes. I don't know what to do about that. Reading research papers and text books related to what one is working on should be encouraged in a knowledge profession, yet I almost never see colleagues doing it. I guess if your hands aren't on the keyboard those JIRA tickets won't get closed.
  - dilemma 10y ago
    I just use the kindle app on my phone and read on the bus, subway, anytime I'm waiting for something.
- ioddly 10y ago
  I turn off my computer and read books to end the day. It's a good way to (1) read a lot of books and (2) get away from the endless stream of information/blue light and improve sleep quality. Once it becomes a habit, it's easy to maintain. I'd feel weird if I didn't do it at this point.
- arkitaip 10y ago
  Oh god yes. I have a stack of GREAT books I want to read but I just don't have that kind of focus anymore. Which makes me really sad because reading books used to be such an important part of my life.
- nicklaf 10y ago
  In my experience, the trick is to accumulate lists of books, links, people, and other potential interests, etc., and dip into them whenever you aren't preoccupied (in lieu of checking what the Attention Merchents want you to [1]) to get your mind going, not forcing yourself on any particular one, and over time you end up using a lot of free moments to continuously ponder the small bits you glimpsed, until one day it strikes you that one particular book is so obviously worth your time that you devour it. (The process is sort of like an avalanche.) [1] https://www.amazon.com/Attention-Merchants-Scramble-Inside-Heads/dp/0385352018 https://www.amazon.com/Attention-Merchants-Scramble-Inside-H...
- ashark 10y ago
  > Does anyone know that feeling and what do you do about it? Why do you want to do something about it?
- jmts 10y ago
  So, how important are these books to you if you're not inclined to read them? I used to read books a lot as a child, but stopped in my teens and have more recently found them more rewarding per unit of time than much of what I find on the internet. I think this started when I realised you can actually buy a copy of The Origin of Species, and so I did. The insights and justifications for evolution presented in that book are much greater than any summary I've ever found online. Things like the imperfection of the fossil record, the importance of one species on the state of an ecosystem, distribution of related species due to geological processes, and so much more. It was a difficult but rewarding book to read, and solidified the importance of reading books for me. I do however suffer from the same lack of motivation and time to invest as you, so I select my books and allocate time appropriately. Currently I set a goal to read for either half an hour, or one chapter of a book, at least once every couple of days. If the book grabs me I may read more, and I feel I can justify that investment quite often. If it doesn't, I may have to put it aside for another time. I find this habit often draws me toward my next book as I am nearing the end of one, however it needs to be one that feels interesting or important to me. If it's not, then it just won't get read.
- rpeden 10y ago
  I used to have that feeling. Reading The Shallows[1] made me stop and think about what might be causing it, and forced me to think about what I might do about it. My solution was to drastically cut back my internet use most of the time I'd have spent online reading books instead. I do what I need to online for work, and I browse HN once a day to keep up with the latest and greatest. I've found that my attention span returned relatively quickly, and reading books for hours at a time became easy again. The neat thing is that the increased attention span didn't just apply to books. I'm able to get more done at work, too, by staying locked on to whatever I'm doing and not getting distracted. [1]https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750 https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/d...
- criddell 10y ago
  Do you ever read fiction?
  - H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
    I got myself back into reading by purchasing a Kindle and downloading all the discworld novels. I found they worked well as a constant stream of content for me to be engaged in, while still reading through a book.
    - criddell 10y ago
      My Kindle is something I simultaneously love and hate. The device itself I love. It's so convenient and pleasant to use, I find that I read a lot more books. My only complaint might be that Amazon doesn't care enough about typography. I hate the device because of DRM. Until fairly recently, stripping the DRM was easy. The new file format (KFX) hasn't been cracked yet and I'm not sure it will be. There are workarounds that involve getting the file in an older format, but then you lose all of the KF8 features.
- tambourine_man 10y ago
  I think we all know it much too well. To me, it's next to impossible to compete with the web. I vacationed in a wonderful place with no internet access. I read a 600 page book effortlessly and with great joy. It was a remarkable feeling. It has always been hard for me to read long books, even articles. But with broadband in my pocket, it's just too hard
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- CuriouslyC 10y ago
  When it comes to famous books that are written in convoluted language (e.g. pretty much all of western philosophy) I usually will read a summary of the book first. I might follow that up with a few youtube videos for additional perspective. Then, if anything covered catches my interest and still needs clarification, I'll crack the book with a specific question in mind. Then I scan the index/search the document to pull up the relevant section and read it. While I'm reading I'll formulate additional questions and repeat the process. Trying to read convoluted prose front to back without a specific goal, and without having a general idea of what the author is trying to say ahead of time is pretty much a recipe for fail. On the other hand, I'll happily do a cover to cover on pop-sci book with tight prose that covers experimental findings in plain english.
- nikki93 10y ago
  One thing that helps me is to keep a pencil handy and act as if I am noting the book for myself or a friend. So I mark important parts, say "see also <other thing>" or write little summaries in the margins. This turns the reading into an active adventure and makes me feel more accomplished for reading. Also the next time I pick it up I can get a quick summary of what I read so far by going through my marked notes to get some momentum to read the new stuff!
- unexistance 10y ago
  I accidentally find that if my phone is off / off-data, I can read the books that I want, BUT it'll take some time to adjust my mind, a week in my case I intend to do that from time to time as the to-read list is growing :D
- keithnz 10y ago
  Like others, I just made a choice to read instead of consume the internet. I commute on the train, and spent a bunch of time playing with code / reading info. I now mix it up with reading a book. It's been good, I feel it enhances my intellectual energies rather than drains them.
- flatMapDS 10y ago
  Well I read a lot of papers and textbooks, because I am work a lot with distributed systems, outside of the stuff for the masses, a lot of it is actually reading work papers by theorists, and then implementing the concepts, usually haphazardly mashed together with others in a realistic way. Don't believe me well zookeeper - paxos, riak - dynamo paper, cassandra - dynamo paper, go's CSP - hoares paper, Concurrent ML CSP - Hoares paper, bit torrent - kademlia, dynamo - chord, swim, b+ tree papers the list goes on and on As for outside of that I used to read a lot of novels and books on philosophy until I was like 18, now I just read really fucked up Seinen Manga. But like guys who are writing the compilers,servers, concurrency paradigms, etc. that you use have to read a lot even if it's limited to Tech.
chmaynard 10y ago
Articles, videos, etc. about Alan Kay show up frequently on HN. This puzzles me. Kay seems like a peripheral figure in the history of CS. I know him mainly for his work on Smalltalk and his iconoclastic views on trends in CS and the tech industry. Is there a consensus in the CS community that Kay is an important figure who deserves this kind of adulation? Do any of us really understand or care about his achievements? Just asking.
- cconroy 10y ago
  You cannot have a turing award and be a `peripheral figure` in the history of CS. And of the turing award recipients he cares most about the field reminiscent of physicists, mathematicians, geologists, etc. (Last sentence is my opinion.)
- da02 10y ago
  What are some people you think deserve more attention? (For me, Alan Kay is good publicist for other geniuses. He's talked about Ivan Sutherland, Neil Postman, etc. I was overlooking those people until I started watching his talks on Youtube.)
  - lacampbell 10y ago
    I never knew about the Mother of all Demos before watching him either. Still amazing today.
- jarmitage 10y ago
  This is like reducing Doug Engelbart to 'the guy who invented the mouse'.
- mjn 10y ago
  He's considered important in at least two fairly central, mainstream R&D areas. One, object-oriented programming, where his development of message-passing OO and the design of Smalltalk are an influential line of thought. And two, interactive, iterative development environments, which you can think of as attempts to create a more visual, structured next-gen of the REPL paradigm. It's true that his specific outputs there (Smalltalk, Squeak, etc.) have never become that mainstream. But: 1) they have become much more widely used than a lot of other research systems (Smalltalk is not just some PhD thesis used by 3 people), and 2) being even "highly influential" on two major areas of development that are mainstream-important is a pretty high bar to clear already.
kevinSuttle 10y ago
OP: what is the source of this list?
- wowsig 10y ago
  Hey, here it is http://wiki.c2.com/?AlanKaysReadingList http://wiki.c2.com/?AlanKaysReadingList
  - DavidSJ 10y ago
    If I may say so, that is a much less noisy and more readable version of this list.
    - wowsig 10y ago
      You are entitled to your opinion. Less noisy, I agree. More readable, I agree on that too. But if you want to take actions on the list, like add them to your reading list or even know a little bit more about the books, it takes quite a few back and forth between Google/Amazon whatever you are using. And if a lot of people are interested in that (and people are interested), that's a lot of work for a lot of people. That's what I've tried to reduce here.
      - justin66 10y ago
        The title Alan Kay from Viewpoints Research Institute recommends his reading list for beginners is problematical. The present tense "recommends" implies that Alan Kay was involved in the presentation of this page, either using it as a tool to present his recommendations, or giving his recommendations to an interviewer who created the page. On the contrary, it appears this list was just harvested from other people's (old!) work, without attribution. I wonder how many people who've "recommended" or "curated" stuff on ShelfJoy have actually... recommended or curated stuff on ShelfJoy? So far I've looked at four pages and only one seems to sort of look like it was created by the person whose name was on the top of the page. The header Book Recommendations from Alex Turnbull from Groove is as ambiguous as the rest, with no author listed and no date, but it includes a "Notes" section for each book. That guy must have written the notes, right? So the way to tell if any given ShelfJoy page is really written by the person whose name at the top is the presence or absence of those notes next to the book titles? Or is there more to it? edit: the title Books that Bill Gates reviewed in his notes strikes me as clearer.
giardini 10y ago
Had to laugh at the entry "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes. When I first saw this ominous-looking tome on a bookstore shelf my heart sank: I knew that I would never, ever be able to title a book to match this one. Never mind that the book's contents is likely misguided - the title is simply the ultimate author's dream title. Indeed, to paraphrase Keats, it is "a thing of beauty [and] a joy forever."
- mirimir 10y ago
  I enjoyed it, many years ago. And it was good background for Stephenson's Snow Crash. I vaguely recall that its thesis, and Sperry's work on split-brain patients, were out of favor for quite a while. But maybe attracting renewed support?
  - kranner 10y ago
    Westworld (the TV series) is making it popular again.
dang 10y ago
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Alan%20Kay%27s%20reading%20list&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Alan%20Kay%27s%20reading%20lis... Dozens(!) of comments by Alan on the last one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11803165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11803165.

144 points by wowsig 10y ago

Kenji 10y ago

When I look at this list, I see many books that look very interesting. This seems like exactly the way to look at life which I like. However, I can't read books anymore. I just find it impossible to sit down and keep my nose in front of a book for an hour or two. I am so accustomed to reading texts with vast amounts of information density about precisely the things I need or I am interested in (usually, I find such articles on the internet) that I cannot sustain the motivation to read an entire book anymore (not to mention, reading takes intellectual resources which are valuable and assigned to other tasks). Does anyone know that feeling and what do you do about it?

wowsig 10y ago
I think a lot of people would say yes to that feeling. Reading is a mentally taxing activity and thats exactly why it is required. I'd say books are like a huge piece of argument for a stance and it really pays well to understand things deeply. There are means of achieving reading without any reading too. Have you tried audio books? I haven't, my mind drifts too much in audio books, but some friends swear by them.
- Kenji 10y ago
  I love audio books, but it's not fast enough and it's harder to revisit parts that you didn't quite understand or really liked. Also, it depends a lot on the speaker and whether they themselves understand what they are reading. Not to mention, some matters like, say, the description of algorithms and data structures, are really unfit to be presented with audio books. Still, audio books are nice.
jwhite 10y ago
Yes, I've noticed that about myself too. Reading is a high investment / high reward activity, and you have to make an effort to do it. One approach is to set aside a time slot daily where you just read, like the hour before bed time for example. You could also set goals for your self (e.g. read a book a week, a chapter a night, etc.) but that might turn it into a chore and make it less likely that you'll stick with it. It depends on your personality I suppose. I've also noticed that reading in the office attracts strange looks sometimes. I don't know what to do about that. Reading research papers and text books related to what one is working on should be encouraged in a knowledge profession, yet I almost never see colleagues doing it. I guess if your hands aren't on the keyboard those JIRA tickets won't get closed.
- dilemma 10y ago
  I just use the kindle app on my phone and read on the bus, subway, anytime I'm waiting for something.
ioddly 10y ago
I turn off my computer and read books to end the day. It's a good way to (1) read a lot of books and (2) get away from the endless stream of information/blue light and improve sleep quality. Once it becomes a habit, it's easy to maintain. I'd feel weird if I didn't do it at this point.
arkitaip 10y ago
Oh god yes. I have a stack of GREAT books I want to read but I just don't have that kind of focus anymore. Which makes me really sad because reading books used to be such an important part of my life.
nicklaf 10y ago
In my experience, the trick is to accumulate lists of books, links, people, and other potential interests, etc., and dip into them whenever you aren't preoccupied (in lieu of checking what the Attention Merchents want you to [1]) to get your mind going, not forcing yourself on any particular one, and over time you end up using a lot of free moments to continuously ponder the small bits you glimpsed, until one day it strikes you that one particular book is so obviously worth your time that you devour it. (The process is sort of like an avalanche.) [1] https://www.amazon.com/Attention-Merchants-Scramble-Inside-Heads/dp/0385352018 https://www.amazon.com/Attention-Merchants-Scramble-Inside-H...
ashark 10y ago
> Does anyone know that feeling and what do you do about it? Why do you want to do something about it?
jmts 10y ago
So, how important are these books to you if you're not inclined to read them? I used to read books a lot as a child, but stopped in my teens and have more recently found them more rewarding per unit of time than much of what I find on the internet. I think this started when I realised you can actually buy a copy of The Origin of Species, and so I did. The insights and justifications for evolution presented in that book are much greater than any summary I've ever found online. Things like the imperfection of the fossil record, the importance of one species on the state of an ecosystem, distribution of related species due to geological processes, and so much more. It was a difficult but rewarding book to read, and solidified the importance of reading books for me. I do however suffer from the same lack of motivation and time to invest as you, so I select my books and allocate time appropriately. Currently I set a goal to read for either half an hour, or one chapter of a book, at least once every couple of days. If the book grabs me I may read more, and I feel I can justify that investment quite often. If it doesn't, I may have to put it aside for another time. I find this habit often draws me toward my next book as I am nearing the end of one, however it needs to be one that feels interesting or important to me. If it's not, then it just won't get read.
rpeden 10y ago
I used to have that feeling. Reading The Shallows[1] made me stop and think about what might be causing it, and forced me to think about what I might do about it. My solution was to drastically cut back my internet use most of the time I'd have spent online reading books instead. I do what I need to online for work, and I browse HN once a day to keep up with the latest and greatest. I've found that my attention span returned relatively quickly, and reading books for hours at a time became easy again. The neat thing is that the increased attention span didn't just apply to books. I'm able to get more done at work, too, by staying locked on to whatever I'm doing and not getting distracted. [1]https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750 https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/d...
criddell 10y ago
Do you ever read fiction?
- H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
  I got myself back into reading by purchasing a Kindle and downloading all the discworld novels. I found they worked well as a constant stream of content for me to be engaged in, while still reading through a book.
  - criddell 10y ago
    My Kindle is something I simultaneously love and hate. The device itself I love. It's so convenient and pleasant to use, I find that I read a lot more books. My only complaint might be that Amazon doesn't care enough about typography. I hate the device because of DRM. Until fairly recently, stripping the DRM was easy. The new file format (KFX) hasn't been cracked yet and I'm not sure it will be. There are workarounds that involve getting the file in an older format, but then you lose all of the KF8 features.
tambourine_man 10y ago
I think we all know it much too well. To me, it's next to impossible to compete with the web. I vacationed in a wonderful place with no internet access. I read a 600 page book effortlessly and with great joy. It was a remarkable feeling. It has always been hard for me to read long books, even articles. But with broadband in my pocket, it's just too hard
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
CuriouslyC 10y ago
When it comes to famous books that are written in convoluted language (e.g. pretty much all of western philosophy) I usually will read a summary of the book first. I might follow that up with a few youtube videos for additional perspective. Then, if anything covered catches my interest and still needs clarification, I'll crack the book with a specific question in mind. Then I scan the index/search the document to pull up the relevant section and read it. While I'm reading I'll formulate additional questions and repeat the process. Trying to read convoluted prose front to back without a specific goal, and without having a general idea of what the author is trying to say ahead of time is pretty much a recipe for fail. On the other hand, I'll happily do a cover to cover on pop-sci book with tight prose that covers experimental findings in plain english.
nikki93 10y ago
One thing that helps me is to keep a pencil handy and act as if I am noting the book for myself or a friend. So I mark important parts, say "see also <other thing>" or write little summaries in the margins. This turns the reading into an active adventure and makes me feel more accomplished for reading. Also the next time I pick it up I can get a quick summary of what I read so far by going through my marked notes to get some momentum to read the new stuff!
unexistance 10y ago
I accidentally find that if my phone is off / off-data, I can read the books that I want, BUT it'll take some time to adjust my mind, a week in my case I intend to do that from time to time as the to-read list is growing :D
keithnz 10y ago
Like others, I just made a choice to read instead of consume the internet. I commute on the train, and spent a bunch of time playing with code / reading info. I now mix it up with reading a book. It's been good, I feel it enhances my intellectual energies rather than drains them.
flatMapDS 10y ago
Well I read a lot of papers and textbooks, because I am work a lot with distributed systems, outside of the stuff for the masses, a lot of it is actually reading work papers by theorists, and then implementing the concepts, usually haphazardly mashed together with others in a realistic way. Don't believe me well zookeeper - paxos, riak - dynamo paper, cassandra - dynamo paper, go's CSP - hoares paper, Concurrent ML CSP - Hoares paper, bit torrent - kademlia, dynamo - chord, swim, b+ tree papers the list goes on and on As for outside of that I used to read a lot of novels and books on philosophy until I was like 18, now I just read really fucked up Seinen Manga. But like guys who are writing the compilers,servers, concurrency paradigms, etc. that you use have to read a lot even if it's limited to Tech.

chmaynard 10y ago

Articles, videos, etc. about Alan Kay show up frequently on HN. This puzzles me. Kay seems like a peripheral figure in the history of CS. I know him mainly for his work on Smalltalk and his iconoclastic views on trends in CS and the tech industry. Is there a consensus in the CS community that Kay is an important figure who deserves this kind of adulation? Do any of us really understand or care about his achievements? Just asking.

cconroy 10y ago
You cannot have a turing award and be a `peripheral figure` in the history of CS. And of the turing award recipients he cares most about the field reminiscent of physicists, mathematicians, geologists, etc. (Last sentence is my opinion.)
da02 10y ago
What are some people you think deserve more attention? (For me, Alan Kay is good publicist for other geniuses. He's talked about Ivan Sutherland, Neil Postman, etc. I was overlooking those people until I started watching his talks on Youtube.)
- lacampbell 10y ago
  I never knew about the Mother of all Demos before watching him either. Still amazing today.
jarmitage 10y ago
This is like reducing Doug Engelbart to 'the guy who invented the mouse'.
mjn 10y ago
He's considered important in at least two fairly central, mainstream R&D areas. One, object-oriented programming, where his development of message-passing OO and the design of Smalltalk are an influential line of thought. And two, interactive, iterative development environments, which you can think of as attempts to create a more visual, structured next-gen of the REPL paradigm. It's true that his specific outputs there (Smalltalk, Squeak, etc.) have never become that mainstream. But: 1) they have become much more widely used than a lot of other research systems (Smalltalk is not just some PhD thesis used by 3 people), and 2) being even "highly influential" on two major areas of development that are mainstream-important is a pretty high bar to clear already.

kevinSuttle 10y ago

OP: what is the source of this list?

wowsig 10y ago
Hey, here it is http://wiki.c2.com/?AlanKaysReadingList http://wiki.c2.com/?AlanKaysReadingList
- DavidSJ 10y ago
  If I may say so, that is a much less noisy and more readable version of this list.
  - wowsig 10y ago
    You are entitled to your opinion. Less noisy, I agree. More readable, I agree on that too. But if you want to take actions on the list, like add them to your reading list or even know a little bit more about the books, it takes quite a few back and forth between Google/Amazon whatever you are using. And if a lot of people are interested in that (and people are interested), that's a lot of work for a lot of people. That's what I've tried to reduce here.
    - justin66 10y ago
      The title Alan Kay from Viewpoints Research Institute recommends his reading list for beginners is problematical. The present tense "recommends" implies that Alan Kay was involved in the presentation of this page, either using it as a tool to present his recommendations, or giving his recommendations to an interviewer who created the page. On the contrary, it appears this list was just harvested from other people's (old!) work, without attribution. I wonder how many people who've "recommended" or "curated" stuff on ShelfJoy have actually... recommended or curated stuff on ShelfJoy? So far I've looked at four pages and only one seems to sort of look like it was created by the person whose name was on the top of the page. The header Book Recommendations from Alex Turnbull from Groove is as ambiguous as the rest, with no author listed and no date, but it includes a "Notes" section for each book. That guy must have written the notes, right? So the way to tell if any given ShelfJoy page is really written by the person whose name at the top is the presence or absence of those notes next to the book titles? Or is there more to it? edit: the title Books that Bill Gates reviewed in his notes strikes me as clearer.

giardini 10y ago

Had to laugh at the entry "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes. When I first saw this ominous-looking tome on a bookstore shelf my heart sank: I knew that I would never, ever be able to title a book to match this one. Never mind that the book's contents is likely misguided - the title is simply the ultimate author's dream title. Indeed, to paraphrase Keats, it is "a thing of beauty [and] a joy forever."

mirimir 10y ago
I enjoyed it, many years ago. And it was good background for Stephenson's Snow Crash. I vaguely recall that its thesis, and Sperry's work on split-brain patients, were out of favor for quite a while. But maybe attracting renewed support?
- kranner 10y ago
  Westworld (the TV series) is making it popular again.

dang 10y ago

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Alan%20Kay%27s%20reading%20list&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Alan%20Kay%27s%20reading%20lis... Dozens(!) of comments by Alan on the last one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11803165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11803165.