Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

The solution explorer from Visual Studio flashes into my mind when I think about the codebases I'm most familiar with, and thinking about the code makes the code file come to mind like it's a big piece of paper and it's all represented physically in some form in my mind. I wonder if the way this happens acts like something of an exploit to get those physical textbook benefits.

The decline of programming books removed a constraint on programming language complexity. At one point, the basic set of books for Java was six volumes. That's when language books broke down from sheer complexity. The combination of Google search and Stack Overflow allowed programming to become more complex than anyone could keep in their head. C++ bloated to the point that people who used to be C++ language lawyers couldn't keep up.

This follows a general trend. Areas which used to be bounded by the limits of the human mind stopped being bounded that way some time back. This first appeared in corporate structure. Through the 1970s or so, there was an upper limit on corporate complexity. Beyond some point, connectivity problems started to choke the organization. There were classic ways around this, mainly dividing companies into sub-companies with their own profit lines. "The Concept of the Corporation" by Peter Drucker describes how General Motors did that. GM was at the time a group of loosely connected car companies under one corporate roof.

A few companies figured out scaling early. Sears was famous for having developed the "Schedule System", which reduced fulfillment overhead from O(N * M) to O(N log M). This allowed Sears to run a giant ordering plant out of Chicago to serve the whole country. But many companies didn't scale well, and choked as they grew. Westinghouse is a classic example.

As computers came in, the scaling problems receded. Airlines got their reservation systems under control, and seat utilization went up. Logistics went from warehouses to fulfillment centers, with much shorter holding times in inventory. Chains no longer were limited in size - WalMart, McDonalds, and the big banks could expand to planetary scale. The giant corporate paper-pushing plants disappeared.

So did forced organizational simplicity. Companies had, at some level, to be simple. Otherwise they became unmanageable. As computerization proceeded, that constraint was relaxed.

Finance achieved previously unimaginable levels of complexity. Until the 1980s, most financial products were rather simple. Now, there's no limit, and the tail wags the dog. Futures markets are far bigger than the volume in the underlying commodity, and zero-sum activity dominates.

AI will accelerate this. There will be businesses no human can comprehend or manage. This may not be productive but will be profitable for someone.

I wasn't aware of this.

The first edition came out in 1991. The 4th ed came out in 2012, by which time Perl was no longer the duct tape of the internet. Perl 6 had muddied the waters, and Ruby and Rails had peaked.

Still, 1000 is painfully low, esp. for a high quality product.

I tried to introduce a partner to programming with an introductory Python book one year ago. It was brand new on the shelf in the impulse purchase area at Micro Center. It looked nice on the outside and decently vetted at a glance of the intro and a page or two, I trusted Micro Center (undeserved in retrospect), and I was in a bit of a rush. I gave it to my partner to try out on their own and they started having trouble pretty quick, and it wasn't really their fault - it was using a lot of technical terms and concepts with no explanation that you wouldn't expect someone to know who hasn't taken a few Computer Science classes.

And the best part.. it was Python 2.7. Micro Center sold me a brand new, glossy covered "Learn Python" book based on 2.7 in the year Anno Domini 2025. Its instructions didn't even properly tell you to install that version, so if you even make it that far you're going to be lost why the syntax is wrong for every example.

Moral is, books are just as easy to strike out on as a bad online resource. Honestly, I feel like Googling "x language tutorial" is probably going to get you the best results much more easily than picking something off the book shelf - if I can't vet a book reliably, and I already know the damn language inside and out, what hope does a newcomer have?

There is a good ending at least. Among a bunch of random stuff I got from an infrared spectroscopy shop that was closing down and practically giving away all their cool equipment, I found a copy of K&R C. I'd never read it myself but I'd heard so much about it online over the years that I figured it was as worth a try. So I got the victim of the Python book set up with WSL and gcc, and they had a much better time that time around.

And Google already had Google Video when they bought YouTube. They retired their own platform to go all in on the acquisition.