The Scottish Book

Perhaps with the hosted/private version of SO? That would solve the issue of restricting it to a certain social circle. Or just a forum, with login access given only to certain persons; perhaps public so that anyone can read the questions & answers.

I think there's an inherent problem between programmers/software engineers and the rest of the science/math community when it comes to their outlook on life. There was a post, I think last year, on HN on famous science, math, dev, physics quotes. It was just a large list really. Anyways, when you read through them, you pick up that in other technical professions, they have a rather bright, happy outlook on life. Science is a way to bring joy to the world, some way some how. Even math is a way to find the beauty in the natural world. Humanity's pursuit in the sciences will make the sky bluer. Hope is powered by the study of physics.

Every quote by a dev/coder/cs quote amounted to, "The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train."

I do agree it would be interesting for a computer science version of this and in practice would be online similar to a Slack Exchange or Reddit format... but reality is, it's going to be a dumpster fire without a nuclear-powered-iron-fist of keeping the peace.

Indeed. The Nazis took special care when occupying Eastern Europe to seek out and kill anyone who could qualify as an intellectual (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion).

They wanted to reduce the Slavic peoples of the east to a slave caste, a dumb, unthinking labor force suitable only for hard manual labor. So anyone who had demonstrated a facility for the work of the mind -- scientists, artists, teachers, civil servants, and so forth -- had to go.