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Alan Kay's Reading List
- applecore 13y agoShould we add Human Universals to this list?
- unphasable 13y agoseems impossible to find, at least last time I checked.
- bennesvig 13y agoHere's Alan Kay talking about The Inner Game of Tennis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50L44hEtVos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50L44hEtVos
- avodonosov 13y agosuper! thanks
- arethuza 13y agoEven more than Cosmos I regard The Ascent of Man as the documentary series that had the biggest impact on me - I was probably only 8 when it was shown on the BBC, but I can still remember watching it, particularly this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0PDGZKGAWs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0PDGZKGAWs NB The Leó Szilárd he mentions was the Hungarian physicist who had the original idea for an atomic bomb while crossing a road in London in 1933, as Richard Rhodes described it: "The stoplight changed to green. Szilárd stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woes, the shape of things to come." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le%C3%B3_Szil%C3%A1rd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le%C3%B3_Szil%C3%A1rd
- doomrobo 13y agoSurprised GEB isn't in there
- coolsunglasses 13y agoMany didn't like GEB and found it a bit vacuous and longer than the material merited.
- hhm 13y agoThat's me. I can understand why people like it, but I found more rigorous materials on the same subject to be a lot more interesting.
- kikibobo69 13y agoCare to recommend some alternatives?
- xrt 13y agoLISP 1.5 manual (MITPress)
- coolsunglasses 13y agohttp://learnyouahaskell.com/ http://learnyouahaskell.com/ https://github.com/NICTA/course/ https://github.com/NICTA/course/ http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/ http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/ http://www.haskellforall.com/2012/06/you-could-have-invented-free-monads.html http://www.haskellforall.com/2012/06/you-could-have-invented... http://www.amazon.com/How-Prove-Structured-Daniel-Velleman/dp/0521675995/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1396828090&sr=1-5&keywords=how+to+solve+it http://www.amazon.com/How-Prove-Structured-Daniel-Velleman/d...
- delian66 13y agoI do not understand ... please, can you elaborate what is the connection between GEB (which I presume is 'Gödel, Escher, Bach') and for example the "Learn you a Haskell" book ? They are both good books, but I do not think that books about programming languages are suitable alternatives to GEB.
- jacobolus 13y agoPreviously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=664324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=664324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=92007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=92007
- gabriel 13y agoDid you all see at the bottom: "COMPUTERS (most of the good stuff is still in papers, here are a few books)" Most of the good stuff is still in paper!
- MichaelGG 13y agoIn papers, meaning not published books but papers in journals.
- avodonosov 13y agoI can't even complete this list, how can he read all these books...
- mindcrime 13y agoWell, Alan Kay isn't a young guy. Presumably, he's been reading for many years. Knock out a couple a year and you should be good to go. On the flip side, remember this any time you read someone else's "recommended reading list"... if YOU sat down and wrote your "recommended reading list" it would probably also be very long and impressive as well.. it would just (probably) have a lot of different titles on it.
- elviejo 13y agoHe learnt to read when he was an infant.. I remember clearly in a conference he said: "... by the time I got to school I have read a couple of hundred books ..."
- interstitial 13y agoI've read most of them, close to 90% -- and I still suck at life. Your mileage will vary.
- briancaw2 13y agoRead some literature.
- laxatives 13y agoIt says Alan Kay has a library of 5000 books. Do you have 5000 books?
- ryannevius 13y ago0.9 * 5000 != 5000
- laxatives 13y ago0.9 ~ 1
- Arcanum-XIII 13y agoYou don't have to own a book to have read it - library, friend lending you book, and so on are all great way to get and share information. We often forget that in our current digital age, swapping as always been easy since Guttenberg.
- interstitial 13y agoActually my library is closer to 10,000.
- laxatives 13y agoHow do you maintain such a library? Do you devote a portion of your house? I always thought I had a pretty sizable library, but its probably <1000 books (and probably <500). As of now, its basically one book shelf with 5 rows, 2 of which are filled with paperbacks and two books deep (the other rows are larger books, including textbooks and only a single book deep) and another drawer filled with things that are in my reading queue, maybe 50 books total. I'm still rather young (I just graduated undergrad in December), but I can't imagine having a library of 10,000 books without a sizable portion of my life revolving around maintaining such a monstrosity. It must have cost you a small fortune to acquire 10,000 books and a room to house all of them in anything but cardboard boxes.
- enen 13y agoI just read his Wikipedia page and his early life. What's the point in even trying at life...
- dmoney 13y agoImagine being Kay and having to watch GUIs get increasingly dumbed down, people using Object Oriented Programming to refer to things nothing like what you created, people not using computers to the full potential you thought you had enabled decades ago. "Guys! You're doing it wrong!" But this means there's still a lot of room for "innovation" to build on top of his "inventions" (distinction he made in a talk that[1] was posted here yesterday: invention being creating new things, innovation being the task of bringing them to market). Or if that's not your deal, he laid out the kind of environment that's required to create new inventions. You could try to work in such an environment or create one. It's probably too late to have the same "early life" that he did, but you've learned to read, if you're here you've probably learned to code, and chances are you've still got at least a couple "lives"[2] left in you. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7538063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7538063 [2] http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2722 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2722
- laichzeit0 13y agoI think John von Neumann's early (and later) life is even more incredible.
- steveeq1 13y agoHe should have listed Sussman's and Abelson's classic "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" in the "Computers" section: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
- pfraze 13y agoThree talks by Alan Kay that I highly recommend, particularly the first two: http://pfraze.github.io/2014/03/31/the-mandatory-alan-kay.html http://pfraze.github.io/2014/03/31/the-mandatory-alan-kay.ht...
- dalek2point3 13y agowho does this website belong to? c2.com? really cool domain name, mustve been an early adopter?
- mindcrime 13y agoIt belongs to Ward Cunningham, basically. And yeah, I suppose you could say they were early adopters: [prhodes@captainchaos ~]$ whois c2.com [Querying whois.verisign-grs.com] [Redirected to whois.name.com] [Querying whois.name.com] [whois.name.com] Domain Name: C2.COM Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.name.com Registrar URL: http://www.name.com Updated Date: 2013-09-30T16:21:59-06:00 Creation Date: 1994-10-23T04:00:00-06:00
- sunir 13y agoAnd that website serving the page is the original wiki, WikiWikiWeb. An incredible piece of Internet history and also an incredible resource for software development mastery.
- chokolad 13y agoThis is the first wiki ever, invented by Ward Cunnigham.
- laxatives 13y agoHow does one even go about reading 5000 books? I know it only says his library is 5000 books, but what's the point in amassing a library if you haven't read it? That would be nearly two books a week for 50 years. Imagine if even 5% of those were text books.
- schlagetown 13y agoI like the idea of the "anti-library" — that there can be great value even in unread books: http://www.matthewcornell.org/blog/2009/4/6/on-keeping-an-umberto-eco-like-anti-library.html http://www.matthewcornell.org/blog/2009/4/6/on-keeping-an-um...
- Jun8 13y agoTo cure you out of this vision of a library I would suggest you read Umberto Eco's essay "How to Justify a Private Library” in How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays, it's great! In The Black Swan Taleb summarizes the lesson from this essay as: "“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”"
- wazoox 13y agoI have a room filled with several thousand books I've read, an a shelf in my bedroom filled with several hundred books I bought to read later. Then I have 2 ebook readers with several hundred other books, some I've read, some I haven't read yet. As a child, I've been pretty impressed the first time I've been to some friend's home where there was only a few books, the dictionary, the Guinness book of records and a couple of large, picture books that nobody ever reads. I was so alien to me; even at the age of 12 my bedroom had its longest wall entirely covered in bookshelves.
- madrin-a 13y agohttp://mixtopten.com/top-10-nostradamus-predictions-for-2015/ http://mixtopten.com/top-10-nostradamus-predictions-for-2015...
- brianstorms 13y agoYears ago I interviewed Alan at his home in LA. First thing that struck me about his house was the BOOKS, books everywhere, bookshelves everywhere, shelves in every room, every hallway, stacked everywhere, just nonstop books. Of course, as we were walking through the house before we even sat down, I asked about the books. He proudly told me he read a new book every day. On every subject under the sun. I knew it was gonna be a great interview... it was.
- artimaeis 13y agoAny chance you could share that interview?
- brianstorms 13y agoAll in good time. That was the first of 3 or 4 interviews I did with him as part of research for my book on the history of the PLATO system, which Alan and a number of PARC folks were keenly aware of and went out and visited (and PLATO folks came out to visit PARC). I went back and checked the transcript of the interview. He told me he reads "somewhere between 200 and 400 books a year, since I was five or so. Depends on the year. And generally a wide range of genres and things. . . most of the sciences."
- vijayr 13y agoOne book, every day? How is it sustainable? Did he know of any speed reading/understanding/retaining techniques?
- jwdunne 13y agoI think part of it is that he has been reading fluently from a young age. My son can barely recognise his name and he's nearly 4. That's a very good head start in terms of practice. It might also be due to a strong natural ability.
- zenbowman 13y agoDidn't know he was in Los Angeles, thanks for letting me know!
- solomatov 13y agoIt's interesting that there's no single book on math or algorithms there.
- gyepi 13y agoI read The Inner Game of Tennis based on Alan Kay's description in a youtube video. It is an excellent book. I am glad to see Csikszenmihalyi on the list as well. Flow is a very powerful concept; we all know it, but understanding it and using it effectively is a different matter entirely. After reading The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh, I realized that all three books are actually talking about the same subject from different perspectives. To this list, I would add: anything by Robert Grudin, but especially: Time and the Art of Living and The Grace of Great Things How to solve it by G. Polya Conceptual Blockbusting by James Adams Nice to see the Mortimer Adler recommendation as well, but I think his How to Read a Book should be a prerequisite for serious reading. As I've gotten older, I've come to the conclusion that true understanding requires the kind of depth that comes from knowing one's self intimately. It's a lot harder than it sounds, especially for a technologist.
- psykotic 13y agoOn several occasions, Kay has mentioned Molecular Biology of the Cell as an outstanding example of how modern technology can be used to create textbooks in the aid of comprehension rather than spectacle. An example of vulgar abuse by Kay's standards would be any of the massive, technicolored tomes with names like Calculus or College Physics.