Basic CS Reading List – M. Douglas McIlroy (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Basic CS Reading List – M. Douglas McIlroy (2010)

cs.dartmouth.edu

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Are you sure this list is "Basic"? for example "Gedanken Experiments Concerning Flows at High Reynolds Number"?

This list seems more like a set of specialized studies for an 'elective' topic course.

They aren't real books. This is a joke.

The one by EWD appears to be real https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340...

Edit: Ok, I admit it's not a book...

The joke in this case is that it's the only one of these titles that's real. (Probably the only.)

And it's humorous to include because of the irony of the title.

I'll explain that one. In the 1970s Burge wrote a book "Recursive Programming Techniques" explaining cool things you can do with functional programming -- yes, a lot of that stuff goes back that far. Reynolds invented a functional language called Gedanken -- the paper was iirc 1972. (I don't remember if Burge used Gedanken in his book, or if it was just similar notation, both inspired by Landin. I think it was the latter and you couldn't actually run any of the code in the book.) The pun is about fluid mechanics and 'control flow'.

My favorite is you have all these pun titles and then:

> The Humble Programmer - E. W. Dijkstra

Which is actually the title of that essay by Dijkstra! http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EW... I guess this guy really doesn't think much of that essay?

I assume the joke is about Dijkstra and “humble”.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11796926

Hilarious.

"The Fellowship of Bacchus - P. Naur" is especially amusing as Backus and Naur were reputed to not get on.

These are hilarious. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying some of them zipped right past me. E.g. "The Fellowship of Bacchus - P. Naur" - ???

Accordingly, I guess that "Trajan" (a real "Roman Emperor") is an interpolation of ACM Turing alum Robert Endre Tarjan, the developer of several important algorithms and data structures.

Briefing for a Recursive Descent into Hell - Benoit Mandelbrot

Brilliant!

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