Most of my favourites have already been listed but one I found particularly interesting was Von Neumann's Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata [0].
Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
31–40 of 265 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
#32Type Systems as Macros
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/stchang/popl2017/
It's not world-changing or even particularly novel, but it's such a simple concept explained very well that really changes how you see the typed/dynamic language divide, as well as language design in general.
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
#33Not a paper, and not strictly CS, but Mythical Man-Month by Brooks. It solidified the connection in my mind between systems engineering and software engineering. Other readings since then have extended and changed this understanding, but this is where my approach to software development started to mature.
And I'd add the paper that inspired Brooks, Melvin Conway's "How Do Committees Invent?".
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
#34The Mythical Man-Month https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~yfcai/CS451/RequiredReadings/Myth...
And the paper that inspired it, Melvin Conway's "How Do Committees Invent?"
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
#35Automated Distributed Execution of LLVM code using SQL
JIT Compilation
As collected by the SIGBOVIK group:
http://sigbovik.org/2017/proceedings.pdf
Quote:
"Following the popularity of MapReduce, a whole ecosystem of Apache Incubator Projects has emerged that all solve the same problem. Famous examples include Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Pikachu, Apache Pig, German Spark and Apache Hive [1]. However, these have proven to be unusable because they require the user to write code in Java. Another solution to distributed programming has been proposed by Microsoft with their innovative Excel system. In large companies, distributed execution can be achieved using Microsoft Excel by having hundreds of people all sitting on their own machine working with Excel spreadsheets. These hundreds of people e combined can easily do the work of a single database server."
PS: This thread is great, i'm bookmarking because here there are good (serious) papers.
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
#36Peter Naur, "Programming as theory building." (1985)
“…programming properly should be regarded as an activity by which the programmers form or achieve a certain kind of insight, a theory, of the matters at hand. This suggestion is in contrast to what appears to be a more common notion, that programming should be regarded as a production of a program and certain other texts.”
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7491661
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
#37Most of my favourites have already been listed but one I found particularly interesting was Von Neumann's Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata [0]. [0] http://cba.mit.edu/events/03.11.ASE/docs/VonNeumann.pdf
+1 to this. Von Neumann was well ahead of his time with his automata ideas. I found in interesting how both Von Neumann and Turing turned to analyse biological systems later in their careers.
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
#38How to share a secret by Adi Shamir. Simple, elegant, short and highly impactful.
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
#39"Reflections on Trusting Trust" - Ken Thompson https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp...
Seconded.
Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?
#40"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 i…
> you will see that the DAO hack and its reversal as inevitable. Honest naïve question. What's the proof?
FWIW I think this is a very fair question. Parent's post veers a bit further toward defeatism than I think Smith's paper advocates for or justifies. In particular, of course the DAO hack wasn't inevitable -- a more careful programmer could've foreseen and prevented that attack and whole other classes of attack.