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
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 :)
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.
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.