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I believe that Tolkien is one of the folks he read Old Books with.
I believe that Tolkien is one of the folks he read Old Books with.
I believe that Tolkien is one of the folks he read Old Books with.
Tolkien is the one that convinced Lewis to leave atheism behind and become a Christian. Tolkien's poem "Mythopoeia" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythopoeia_(poem) - was instrumental in that process.
It's worthwhile to read it, but as a warning, it was written from one (highly educated) friend to another (highly educated friend), and it is not easy to understand what Tolkien is trying to say about the nature of reality without reading through it a few times: http://home.agh.edu.pl/~evermind/jrrtolkien/mythopoeia.htm
If we were to apply this idea to computer science or software engineering, where would we draw the line between old and new books?
Technological books do not age as well, because technical knowledge is predominantly cumulative. It's for fields where thoughts are evergreen (basically, anything to do with being human, literature, poetry, philosophy, etc) where this advice matters. A good modern book on math, or chemistry, or compiler construction has more knowledge than any old one. A good modern poet is not better than Shakespeare or Homer (and i…
Tell that to Claude Shannon, Fred Brooks, and Ken Thompson. "A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits", "The Mythical Man-month" and "On Trusting Trust" have aged fine, I promise.
If we were to apply this idea to computer science or software engineering, where would we draw the line between old and new books?
* Foundations, before any computer was feasible to build: Newton, Boole, Babbage
* Early computing, when everything was custom-built: Alan Turing, Vannevar Bush, Claude Shannon
* Mainframes, where computer access is rare and precious
* Personal computers and early networking
* Mobile computing and ubiquitous internet
If we were to apply this idea to computer science or software engineering, where would we draw the line between old and new books?
Technological books do not age as well, because technical knowledge is predominantly cumulative. It's for fields where thoughts are evergreen (basically, anything to do with being human, literature, poetry, philosophy, etc) where this advice matters. A good modern book on math, or chemistry, or compiler construction has more knowledge than any old one. A good modern poet is not better than Shakespeare or Homer (and i…
Mathematics textbooks are just as likely as anything else to suffer from modern pedagogical theories that have not been tested by time and will come to be regarded as mistakes.
It is often presumed that because we learn new things as time goes on, and old theories are discarded as new information comes to light, that there is not much value in reading older science books. After all, isn't half of that stuff wrong? But similar to how Jack says how one can learn about different flavors of Christianity by stepping out of his own century, and thereby how much they have in common, I feel that by reading the original works of Millikan, Carnot, Gibbs, or Einstein, that you get a much better idea of the perspective that developed the theories we see as so cut-and-dried today.
I could find no record of them having ever even existed. I opened a few of them and found out why. They sucked.
If we were to apply this idea to computer science or software engineering, where would we draw the line between old and new books?