Sounds like there's a market for a derived work that uses contemporary rhetoric.

Yeah I think there might be.

One which I really enjoyed was:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycl...

I don’t know of many others like it.

I’d really like to ‘get into’ the classics, but it’s like I need to onboard by reading a bunch of contemporary motorcycle style versions first, so I have some familiarity with the concepts.

I read ZatAoMM as undergrad, it made a big impression. Forgot to get to it with Lex (his pre-show questions included "your top books").

That’s an interesting book to have on a computer science undergrad course. I guess many of the themes are very relevant, repairing, problem solving, the knowledge that different people approach technology in different ways, etc. Plus I can see it being a cool book to read at the same time as a other folks studying computers.

My high school AP credits let me waive a bunch of Freshman math and science so I took philosophy, theology, etc. courses at SCU. Pirsig was assigned in one of the philosophy classes.

I'm still gradually working on my undergrad. Most times when I'm out of work as a developer I return and complete some of my coursework. As time goes on, I'm finding a much stronger interest in the less-testable and more human oriented classes such as those you mention, but also History, language, and cultural geography. Meanwhile the CS courses are the ones that I'm struggling to be drawn towards; particularly as some of the former desirable compabies to work at face more and more human ethical dilemmas where the computer bit isn't the complicated bit. I suppose since it was my intense motivation to design and build websites that got me in various doors without a degree, as those things become more commodified, it would be expected to look elsewhere for that inspiration, but did you ever find that true for yourself?

Philosophy and theology on a comp sci course is pretty wild, and I guess a good place to meet folks from other departments?

As noted in the interview, I was a Physics major for the first three years. Also in the Honors Program, which helped get in some of the non-science classes.

I mentioned you in my latest javascript, technology and web development newsletter.

https://markjgsmith.substack.com/p/mark-smiths-newsletter-20...

I’d be honoured to have you as a reader, no pressure though, I bet you are super busy, and you probably get a zillion requests like this.

I think he was referencing just happening to have read it while simultaneously being an undergrad, not that he was assigned it required reading. Could be wrong though.

You’re right I might totally have misread that.

It got me thinking though, about the value of having some philosophy in comp sci courses.

Back when I was doing my masters (2002-2003) it was a different era for the web, there wasn’t much thought to ethics or philosophy, but I think it could be very relevant these days. It strikes me that it could be a particularly good time to read the ZAMM book.

I don’t know much about comp sci courses these days, maybe they do have such modules included.

Ya, that seems like a good idea. As of the last few years, philosophy courses at my school were not required, but you'd do them as part of your electives. I don't know how you'd actually formulate a comp sci specific ethics course, but it's an interesting thought experiment

About the only non-computery course we had was a business / management / entrepreneur type course. I don’t remember if it was something we chose to do, but it wasn’t part of the core set of courses that made up the degree.

I feel like we may have had completely different undergrad structures from reading your other comments in this thread. I took my CS degree in the CS department of a liberal arts Uni, and so had a bunch of optional arts credits to fulfill along with some amount of science and then a bunch of specific CS courses.

Having had a glipse of a CS degree that's part of another school's engineering department, I believe their structure is more rigid, and specifically detailed for 4 years.

I'm a little ways in so far, and I think—maybe unless you're a certain type of person—it's a book that you hopefully get lucky with in terms of when in your life you read it. It's a slow read, but the first few chapters have been nice so far, while some others I know have just not clicked with it.

I've been reading it slowly for a little while, and quite like it. I think it's a book that really is not for everyone, or at least only for a certain time, but it's worthwhile.