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I'm going to be interviewing Charles next week for my podcast. Are there questions that you'd like me to ask him?

Sounds amazing. Big fan of his writing style, have two of his books: "Code" and "The Annotated Turing".

I'd be curious to learn about his work habits - have they changed over the years? Has he experienced any procrastination during his career and how he dealt with it? Any advice to those who got bored by the challenges of the modern software industry?

Only now I found that he has a blog, so it looks like I've got some new reading material: https://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/toc.html

I'm really interested about his work habits as well - added your questions to my list. Right now I'm procrastinating editing my podcast by reading HN :)

Do you have any questions about The Annotated Turing? For me, I'm really interested in the story behind why he wrote it. As he writes in the introduction:

"Turing's original motivation in writing this paper was to solve a problem formulated by German mathematician David Hilbert ..."

I want to know Petzold's motivation for writing this. I know there's a story behind there somewhere especially given how long it took him to write the book :)

That's a very good question.

Given how old is Turing's paper and how much it was 'dissected' for the book, I would ask the following: * Any other top papers that inspired Charles (or he found them worthy of serious deep dive)? * Does he still read modern papers?

The latter is particularly interesting. I don't have academic background, but some of the people I spoke to claimed that there's lots of subpar papers produced nowadays. Obviously, amount produced in every field significantly increased lately, so it would be interesting to learn how someone with decades of experience is able to filter that out.

Check out this paper:

https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/propositions-as...

Page 2 gives some background in how Turing's work fit into the problems that Church and Hilbert were about.

It's not especially related to Code, but Charles is one of the all-time greats in Windows programming.

I'd love to hear his thoughts on the current state of Windows: what's going well, what should be done differently.

Sadly, that's an area that he doesn't want to talk about. Not really sure why, but it makes me wonder what the story behind that stance is, and if I can get him to talk about it.

Ah, that's unfortunate. My (wild, speculative) guess is that he's left that part of his career behind, after he was burned by the Windows team dropping the ball on native development multiple times.

After the winrt shitshow, he had given up windows and started on xamarin IIRC. Don’t know if wrote or is writing any books for that though.

Yes, his book Programming Windows was what took me from hopeless newbie to half decent self taught dev while I was still in my teens. Taught me loads that I still find use for to this day in my career (which involves a lot of Windows development).

I wonder if he gets nostalgic for that era of programming, and what stack he would choose if he was writing a Windows app today.

Where do we find your podcast? http://localhost/ shows really weird contents, I probably have the wrong URL.

According to their profile it's https://podcast.pivotalmoments.cc/

Damn, you should go to jail for such content.

haha good one. The url is in user's bio

It seems to work for me. I see "It works!".

Sure. I'd like to hear about his take on AI, maybe even through the lens of policy, and perhaps prompted by this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/jackclarkSF/status/1555980412333133824.

Also, for anyone needing more context on a book called "Code", MS Press has two free chapters, and the TOC, available: https://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780137909100/samplep...

That's an interesting thread. Thanks for sharing.

Not sure if asking about his take on AI will lead anywhere though as that's not really his thing. But I'll explore the area when we talk about Turing (his other book is the Annotated Turing) a bit to see if there's something on the other side that I didn't know about.

For us bibliphiles: why has the second edition no hardcover version or is it planned?

Similarly: is an audiobook planned? Frequently on reddit people ask for recommendations of audiobooks to listen to while commuting, and I realize this one is rather image-heavy, but I do believe a lot of it could be conveyed in an audio format, and it would make for fantastic listening.

How he sees the current dictomy of Windows development, where we kind of have two worlds (.NET and C++), where not every business unit seems to drive into the same direction, many of which even competing on the same space with different stacks.

To a large extent, I'd be interested in his thoughts about being open with Code. I'm an immigrant, and I'd love to do it with my kid. I'd need to have access to text, and run it through a translator to do that. I'm glad to pay the purchase fee, but a DRM'ed book is less than helpful.

There are a lot of tools like nandgame which would integrate well....

Same thing for adaptations for school curricula, afterschool clubs, etc....

I'm not sure the right solution here, but it'd be awesome if there were some way to build from his work for specific contexts.

This is a really interesting area to explore - thanks for suggesting it! I think that there are quite a few authors who have shown that there is a market for the book as well as for an open source "edition" of the book. My favorite from the past was Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing [1] and perhaps more recent is the very complimentary NAND To Tetris [2]

I would imagine that the hard part is dealing with the publisher and getting them on board with it as well. Added to my list!

[1] https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/

[2] https://www.nand2tetris.org/

My favorite is SICP.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/... https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf

It's worth noting the book comes up on most top-10 CS books and sells exceptionally well. It's been translated into countless languages.

Convincing MIT Press was apparently hard the first time, but after the book sold like hotcakes, future books were easy.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/...

Thanks for that example. I had no idea that SICP was now available for free on the web! Do you remember where you heard the story about convincing MIT Press and the outcome? I took a look but couldn't find it.

That might come in handy if this winds up going somewhere.

It's been available for a long time. You can contact the author for the full story. The phone number and office are listed here:

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/

Not everything is web-based. :)

I can guarantee the author will not be offended with either a phone call or by someone dropping by. On the other hand, he's less often in the office post-COVID, so it might take a few tries.

Hal probably knows the story better, but he's a bit less drop-in-able. Jerry is super-friendly. (Hal is friendly too, but more random contacts go to /dev/null)

Thanks!

Dropping by would be harder to do, but a dream interview would be to put him in a room with Guido van Rossum to talk about Python and SICP.

I now need to get over my irrational fear of cold calling someone I don't know already (heck, I don't even do that with people that I do know - it's always "what's a good time to call"?)

Jerry and Guido? I think the conversation might be less interesting than you might hope for. SICP is 1984, almost four decades ago now.

If you wanted to talk about robust programming, quantum gravity, differential geometry, education, or a slew of other topics....

As a footnote, I love Python, but someone like Jerry outclasses Guido intellectually. Guido really only did one thing, which is Python. Jerry has done dozens of things.

It's a great thing that Guido has managed to do that one thing - the world would be poorer without it. It's also a great thing that Jerry has done dozens of things - the world would be poorer without them. I see those accomplishments as complementary.

I think you misunderstand my motivations for putting the two of them in the same room. If there's one thing that I've learned over my years in this world, it's that the magic happens between people, not within any one person's mind. There are three "people" in my scenario - Guido, Jerry, and the audience. Somewhere in that conversation, an idea might be sparked.

... well, it has to be the right people. Perhaps it's worth a try, but I'm not sure there would be a spark like that.

If you put Isaac Newton in the same room as George Washington, it'd be two brilliant people, but I'm not sure they'd have much to talk about. They think about different problems.

What might be interesting, come to think of it, would be a Chat Roulette, but populated with these sorts of folks.

I understand what you're trying to go for, but you're treating people like the equivalent of a particle accelerator hoping that by smashing them together at sufficient velocity... that something will come of it.

In practice I find this rarely to be the case unless you as the facilitator are also commensurately cognitively capable (say that three times fast), otherwise you're sort of placing an excessively undue amount of pressure on them.

Also available at https://github.com/sarabander/sicp

I don't know about other stores (like the Microsoft Press store), but Code is DRM-free on InformIT, in Epub, PDF, and MOBI-- I actually don't think they sell any DRMed eBooks (they personalize and watermark each copy to discourage sharing, but are otherwise unprotected).

Thank you! Looks like I'll be buying a second copy :)

The PDF I got from the Microsoft Press Store was watermarked but DRM free.

I see there's a website for Code with interactive examples (in another thread), I wonder if he has a perspective on using interactive games for teaching this kind of "build a computer from logic gates" material. Examples are the recent "Turing Complete", goes back at least to Rocky's Boots on the Apple II.

Has he seen any of these he thought were effective, does he think it's a useful approach?

Oh wow. I didn't know about the Turing Complete game on Steam[1] I just watched the trailer. Added to my list of questions. Thanks!

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/

Turing Complete is quite rough around the edges (still in early access), but it's very ambitious. In my opinion these don't tend to succeed well as games, even puzzle games. The steps they need to take you through can feel very arbitrary and dull, they tend to bog down in wire routing, and they can be very difficult if you don't know the relevant digital logic already (and boring if you do, or if the game tutorializes it heavily). I'd prefer something that more rapidly ascends in abstraction, embedded in a context where it's natural for players to puzzle out the solutions themselves, e.g. how embodied and gamelike Rocky's Boots was, even if it didn't go far in building up anything complex.

Some more examples:

- Silicon Zeroes, focus on clocks and speed: https://store.steampowered.com/app/684270/Silicon_Zeroes/

- Prime Mover, at a somewhat higher data packet level, freer hierarchical structure: https://store.steampowered.com/app/693700/Prime_Mover/

- ComPressure, continuous signals in steam machines! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1528120/ComPressure/

- MHRD, code in an HDL, avoids the routing issue but text can be unappealing: https://store.steampowered.com/app/576030/MHRD/

I wasn’t aware of your podcast, subscribed :)

I’d like to know how did he get such deep knowledge of the foundations of computing and how he developed the talent for explaining complex topics in a simple way.

Thanks!

This will be a core part of what we'll be talking about. I continue to be amazed by people who can explain complex topics simply and Charles is near the top of my list of people who can do this well. Feynmann and Dave Cutler (if you can, find a copy of his NT kernel spec doc) are on that list too.

Feynman is on my list as well.

Thanks for the suggestion, looking forward to hearing the episode.

Has he tried to push his book into schools ? It's so simple in it's approach yet so pragmatic and large. I wish more topics were dealt this way.

My lecturer taught us this book in college. It was a really nice course : )

That's cool! Do you mind sharing the course/school? It would be a nice thing to share with Charles to show the impact that his work has on the world (even though I'm pretty sure he knows - it's always nice to be reminded of it!)

I'm always interested in early life. Where are they from, what were his parents like, what did he do as a kid, what got him into computers.

The Annotated Turing: how has it been received, how does he feel about it?

Can you ask him when his interest in computers/software started?

Absolutely. My goal in the podcast is to learn the stories about how (and why) people became the person they are today.

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