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A non-standard book list for software developers

mihaiolteanu.me

111–112 of 112 posts

Re: A non-standard book list for software developers

#111

I don’t understand why old programmers are so much fascinated by lisp. If it would have been good it would have survived today.

1. It's all their feeble minds can understand. (This is the answer you were fishing for, yes?) 2. Too many MIT grads were brainwashed by SICP until MIT sensibly switched to Python in 2009. (Unfortunately they probably still secretly teach SICP somewhere.) 3. Lisp/Scheme readily implements "Maxwell's equations of software" which are believed to be important or useful for some reason. /s

I guess someone didn't see the /s or maybe OP was not amused.

Re: A non-standard book list for software developers

#112

I can't comment on the compsci books (they do seem interesting), but I can comment on the mathematical ones where I have expertise: - Using Euclid is manifestly a really bad idea, since his way of formalizing geometry is not the sharpest. Mathematical logic has developed since Euclid published his book thousands of years ago and Euclidean geometry has been re-formalized a number of times to really flesh out the theor…

Having an understanding of mathematical foundations and proofs can be very beneficial to software developers; but I agree there are much better books than the ones suggested here. "Elements" is an historically important book (arguably the most important in math), but like you said is fairly outdated. Real Analysis is critical for higher level maths and theoretical computer science and does have some value even in sof…

If one wanted to read all three of those, what order would you recommend?
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