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Re:David Bowie’s Top 100 Books (2013) by dang on Tuesday January 12, 2016 @03:15PM (#10890017)
The HN guidelines ask you not to be gratuitously negative in comments. This is so gratuitously negative that it could be a parody.

If you'd like to list your favorite books, you should do so (somewhere else, though, since it would be off-topic here). But scorning someone else for not sharing your taste violates the spirit of this site, not to mention was guaranteed to lead the thread further into off-topic bickering.

Re:David Bowie’s Top 100 Books (2013) by dschiptsov on Tuesday January 12, 2016 @08:05PM (#10891618)
Imagine that someone less holy would post a list of supposedly remarkable projects in CS without mentioning McCarthy's LISP, Kay's Smalltalk, Armstrong's Erlang, Stallman's Emacs, Cox's Plan9, git of Linus, etc. How would you react?

Like in this example, these books I have mentioned are not even a matter of opinion, they are such masterpieces, without which no list could be considered worth having.

You probably pissing up the wrong tree.

Re:David Bowie’s Top 100 Books (2013) by tehstone8 on Tuesday January 12, 2016 @08:12PM (#10891655)
This isn't necessarily meant to be a list of remarkable books or masterpieces. It's just the list of one person's favorite 100.
Re:David Bowie’s Top 100 Books (2013) by dang on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @03:24AM (#10893001)
They're utterly a matter of opinion. Please stop, and please don't be uncivil on Hacker News.
Re:David Bowie’s Top 100 Books (2013) by dschiptsov on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @05:31AM (#10893416)
Nope. Certain aesthetics are related to that set of hardwired emotions (as in Minsky's Emotion Machine) we call the Human Nature. The notions of youth, health, beauty, honesty, clarity, straightforwardness, etc.

In software engineering there are other aesthetics. The famous maxim "for people to read and accidentally for machine to execute" sums up almost everything. Clarify, conciseness, readability, modularity, compossibility, loose coupling, design around protocols and interfaces - every decent programming guidelines, such as Google's Common LISP or Python style guides will show you a set of variables to optimize. Norvig's LISP style guide is also nice read.

Like it is in arts, each genre has its own aesthetics, and there are universal ones, such as non verbosity, clarify, following standard, familiar idioms. So, some artifacts are objectively better (according to certain human-universal aesthetics or those derived from laws of complex systems of Nature) than others no matter what conditioning you have in your head. Haskell's syntax, for example, is aesthetically better than Java's no matter what opinion you, or even majority hold.

Do you have sheriff's bage or something?

Re:David Bowie’s Top 100 Books (2013) by dang on Wednesday January 13, 2016 @03:07PM (#10897076)
Yes, I'm the lead moderator of HN. Sorry that wasn't clear.