Interview with Hal Abelson on Code Quarterly

Oh, great to see that Code Quarterly is coming along.

Hal Abelson: My math PhD was in algebraic topology, which had nothing to do with computers. Then I got interested, through thinking about topology, in the relations with distributed computing and that eventually formed a bridge into doing something in computing.

For those wanting to find out a little more about these connections, Herlihy & Rajsbaum, 2000, An Overview of Synchronous Message-Passing and Topology, is a really great place to start.

http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/mph/HerlihyR96/sv.pdf

Awesome interview that sheds a lot of light on how Abelson thinks programming should be taught. I really wish I could have taken 6.001 instead of 6.01 though as a CS student. I had a bit of an a-ha moment reading about the abstractions Abelson talked about in 6.01, but when I was taking the course, it went straight over my head.

If every issue of CQ has an interview of this calibre and quality it's going to be THE essential subscription for the field.

beautiful: ... I’ve decided that from now on, I should be measuring the quality of my life by the ratio of the amount of time spent programming to the amount of time sitting in meetings.

Apart from the great content, I love the typography on the pages. Simple yet elegant. Kudos!

I dont know if its just my setup of FireFox 4 but this is really difficult to read