Notation as a Tool of Thought, Kenneth E. Iverson
Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
11–20 of 265 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
#12Out Of The Tarpit, by Moseley and Marks
https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master...
The first half of the paper is a spot-on critique of so many things that go wrong in the process of designing and implementing large-scale software systems. The second half, where the authors propose a solution, kind of goes off the rails a bit into impracticality... but they definitely point in a promising direction, even if nobody ever uses their concrete suggestions.
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
#13It might be a cliche one to pick, but I really really really enjoy Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"[1]. This paper straddles the line between CS and philosophy, but I think it's an important read for anyone in either field. And a bonus is that it's very well-written and readable.
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
#14Real programmers don't use Pascal
The rise of worse is better
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
#15Without a doubt.
Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System. Leslie Lamport.
http://amturing.acm.org/p558-lamport.pdf
My first introduction to time scales as a partial ordering. Very mind opening.
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
#16A bit cliche for HN, but I really enjoyed RECURSIVE FUNCTIONS OF SYMBOLIC EXPRESSIONS AND THEIR COMPUTATION BY MACHINE (Part I) by John McCarthy[0]. It was accessible to someone whose background at the time was not CS and convinced me of the beauty of CS -- and lisp.
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
#17"The Limits of Correctness" (1985) by Bryan Cantwell Smith:
https://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs492/11public_html/p18...
I know Thompson's "Reflections on Trust" and Shannon's "Communication" papers are more famous but I believe BCS's "Correctness" paper has more immediate relevance to a wider population of programmers.
For example, I don't believe Ethereum's creator, Vitalik Buterin, is familiar with it because if he was, he would have realized that "code is law" is not possible and therefore he would have predicted the DAO hack and subsequent fork/reversal to undo the code.
Seriously, if you read BCS's paper and generalize its lessons learned, you will see that the DAO hack and its reversal as inevitable.
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
#18My favorite paper in computer systems is "Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server". It identifies a problem and devises several clever solutions to the problem. I love papers that make your go "AHA!".
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
#19Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm in "A Note on Two Problems in Connexion with Graphs"
http://www-m3.ma.tum.de/foswiki/pub/MN0506/WebHome/dijkstra....
Pure, mathematical and a great impact on both how to prove and define algorithms as well as the problem itself.
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
#20Kademlia, a P2P distributed hash table. DHTs are very complex from the outside but very simple once you understand the building blocks.
https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~petar/papers/maymounkov-kademlia...