srcerer

Anyone who enjoyed reading that (especially the bit about mathematical reality) absolutely must read Anathem by Neal Stephenson. The proof is rather enumerative, which I will leave as an exercise ;)

As for discussion. Is not the quote "We live either by rule of thumb or on other people’s professional knowledge." the most antithetical to hacker culture you've ever heard?!?

If referring to this sentence: "Examples are the programming languages Clojure, which is a contemporary dialect of Lisp, Rebol and Refal." Perhaps it's just poorly worded, but the intention seems to be to list each of those languages as being homoiconic, with an aside that Clojure is a modern Lisp. Maybe some parenthesis are in order, heh ;)

Curious where "Optimize for less state, less coupling, less complexity and less code...in that order." came from. Would like to read more from that source.

Itching to buy Skiena's book for the practical examples (after perusing what amazon would show me of it)! Another very accessible algorithms book I highly recommend is: http://hetland.org/writing/python-algorithms/

Thanks for the link! Erickson's notes appear to be a treasure trove of insight into algorithms. I flipped to the section on dynamic programming and was impressed by how well the idea was boiled down. Also, sorry for the pedantry, but that link is to a 374 page PDF. For any one that is truly insatiable, peel back the link to algorithms and one will find an everything.pdf that is indeed over 800 pages!

Also Gibson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter_Market