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Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

Don Quixote in Spanish households is like Gödel, Escher, Bach for techies. You bought it when you were young, it sits proudly on your bookshelf, you talk about how meaningful it was... but you've only read a chapter or two.

(c'mon, you gonna pretend you really read the entire GEB on the bookshelf behind you right now?)

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> pretend you really read the entire GEB

Seriously? This is a book that is plenty accessible for high school students, and not outrageously long or notably archaic.

If you want an English-language analogy stick to something like Canterbury Tales or Moby Dick or Ulysses or Infinite Jest.

We read Moby Dick in high school

I have Knuth's TACP sitting proudly on my bookshelf and ... I flipped through it a couple of times thinking, wow, I'm never going to read this am I.

You should just pick a random section and start reading; or better still find a section relevant to something you have worked with before. Knuth is a clear writer and pretty funny, and there is a lot of great insight packed in there.

Note that TAOCP is more a reference book for professional researchers than a book to skim quickly cover-to-cover.

Yeah— that's one of those tomes that takes a superhuman amount of will for most people to push through if they're not being compelled by university course work. Very well-written but it's just a lot of information to absorb.

When I was a teenager, just before I started more seriously getting into programming on the school computers, a Russian friend asked his dad— a soviet university trained software engineer— how he could learn to code. His dad handed him a his stack of Knuth and said "read that and then get back to me."

Of course, the kid read 10 pages of Fundamental Algorithms, put the book down, and never tried to learn how to code ever again. Why would he have? As far as he was concerned, the very first steps were a big pile of confusing theory that wasn't bringing him closer to his goal of doing some fun projects with a computer at any point in the near future. He had to absorb all that just to start? Forget it.

Looking back, I think his dad probably thought it was funny and probably even joked with his coworkers about it... but I wonder how different my friend's path would have been if his dad handed him a copy of Learning Perl (it was the mid 90s) and helped him get ActivePerl installed on his machine. If your nerd machismo is so intense that you're alienating your own teen kid with it, you really need to reconsider your life strategy.

Great story and a cautionary tale for me. That dad sounds like a real asshat.

It's an encyclopedia, you aren't supposed to read it cover to cover.

First reaction: surely there must be a better language to describe algorithms than a made up assembly language.

2nd reaction: holy shit, this is how programmers thought until the 80s.

It is worth working through some of the code until they make sense, but Introduction to Algorithms is much more accessible.

Can't deny the boxes set looks great on a shelf, though.

Might be because that I read it in translation, but Don Quixote always strikes me as something quite easy to read. It’s funny, has a light-hearted tone (however deep its underlying message is), and the story is straightforward.

I did read the whole thing in high school in 1990. I learned to program lisp as a direct result. GEB was one of the more influential books of my late teens, up there with Doors of Perception and The Cuckoo's Egg.

I've taken 3 runs at GEB each time getting a bit further than the last. It's been about 15 years since the last attempt, I think I should give it a go again soon, I think I'm readier for it now than I was in the past.

My copy of GEB fell apart at the spine before I managed to read the whole thing. It's an enormous book and my paperback copy just didn't make it through the trials and tribulations of the daily tram ride to university.

One day.

There was a "Don Quixote" class at my university in the Spanish department. I really regret not taking it because there's no way I'm going to read it in my lifetime.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4A35EEAEE3880943

Haha, I hardly finished the first chapter in GEB.

I read GEB, it only took a decade and a half.

I have only read about 80 pages of El Quijote.

Of course!

It's not like it is a long book.

Now Metamagical Themas is a different story.

Metamagical Themas, a crossover of Don Quixote and GEB

Yes, in high school, over a few weeks.

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