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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I've never understood what engineers find in this book. It looks like a shallow kitchen philosophy of a guy next door to me. What you think is so good about this book for engineers, in a nutshell?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The core thing is exploring just exactly what is subjective and what is objective, and whether quality is subjective or objective. Pirsig came up with an answer, and then goes on to talk about excellence (arete). Thinking back, this discourse seems like it was deliberately embedded in a kind of every day, guy-next-door narrative in order to touch on lived experience of "quality". Although Pirsig didn't explore it, qu…
i donknow... wasting so much time just to get a basic idea that quality is important looks like a terrible book to me. Of course in the context of "books useful for engineers". If you just enjoy someone's couch philosophy - i can totally understand that and agree that the book may be great.
IIRC chapters are contributed by different authors, so it's not a single point of view (even though of course there is some filtering by the editor).
Since it's from 2010 it is light on more recent developments like AI, however (unlike software) it's rare for ethic ideas to become outdated. So I would not dismiss it due to age. Also it's 5$ used on Amazon, so depending on your situation it's not a huge deal to get it and skim it - IMHO this kind of work doesn't have to be read front to back, instead it's great to get back to it when you feel like and think about a few pages and explore new ideas, re-evaluate your own concepts, etc.
Description from the publisher: "The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics, first published in 2010, provides an ambitious and authoritative introduction to the field, with discussions of a range of topics including privacy, ownership, freedom of speech, responsibility, technological determinism, the digital divide, and online pornography."
Editorial reviews stolen from Amazon: "...This five-part work examines difficulties in the field of information ethics and offers practical applications and criticisms... Recommended..." --B. G. Turner, Faulkner University, CHOICE
"...This is a rich and fascinating book, bringing to interpretative debates much that has been hitherto unknown. The chapters are long and complex, and the argument is multidimensional and far-reaching." --George Lăzăroiu, PhD, Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, New York, Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice
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His idea to keep interfaces small and powerful bothered me - I don’t think it expresses any truth about programming despite being a good rule of thumb. I kept feeling frustrated while reading. The lambda calculus has the best interface to functionality ratio possible but you don’t see humans using it to program. This objection led me to the conclusion that a better heuristic would be: programs should try to communica…
Most so the book is meant to be taken as a rule of thumb. I personally think simple interface hiding deep functionality is a really good one. I was looking at the langchain codebase last year after having read the book and the point was struck home. Many of the functions in Langchain are one line wrappers of other functions. I try to think of functions as atomic units of knowledge. Very short functions are a good ind…
He gets a lot of other stuff right though. Love his writing on comments
"Engineers in every discipline learn the limits of the tools and materials they work with. If you’re an electrical engineer, you know the conductivity of various metals and a hundred ways to use a voltmeter. If you’re a structural engineer, you know the load-bearing properties of wood, concrete, and steel.
"If you’re a software engineer, your basic building material is human intellect and your primary tool is you."
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Richard Hamming’s The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is one that’s really shaped my philosophy on CS. It pushes for the importance of reasoning from first principles, experimentation, and taking on extraordinary work. There’s also a fascinating and prescient section on AI and the limits of computers and how we think about them. Stripe Press makes a nicely bound hardcover edition of the book, too: https://press.…
The Civilized Engineer The Introspective Engineer The Existential Pleasures of Engineering
A few others I haven't read