Ask HN: Good Articles for CompEng Technical Communications Course?
I find myself helping to develop a first term Communications (inter-human, a.k.a. "English") course for a college-level Computer Engineering Technology program. Part of what we want to expose them to is good examples of long-form writing on topics that should be of interest to them. In that vein, I'd like to ask for suggestions on articles (or longer works that we can excerpt from) appropriate for an entry-level student in CS or CompEng. Our focus is on good writing rather than technical depth. Some that I've already identified from my own bookshelf and links:
* Kernighan - "What's in a Computer?" (fm. D is for Digital)
* Kidder - "Shorter Than a Season" (fm. The Soul of a New Machine)
* ESR - "A Brief History of Hackerdom"
* Seibel = "Interview with Don Knuth" (fm. Coders at Work)
* RMS - "Freedom to Read"
* PG - At least one essay. Currently leaning towards "Great Hackers" or "Hackers and Painters"
* Spolsky - "The Law of Leaky Abstractions"
* Brooks - "No Silver Bullet"
* Leslie Lamport - "Why we Should Build Software Like We Build Houses"
* Dykstra - "On the Cruelty of Really Teaching CS"
* Neal Stephenson - "Mother Earth, Mother Board"
* Norvig - "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years"
* Ken Thompson - "Reflections on Trusting Trust"
* Vannevar Bush - "As We May Think"
* Tim Berners Lee - "The Semantic Web"
* Stephen Pinker - "Could a Computer Ever be Conscious?"
* Hoare - "The Emperor's Old Clothes"
* Schneier - "Why Cryptography is Harder than it Looks"
* Gladwell - "Creation Myth: Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation"
* Warren Toomey - "The Long Life and Strange Birth of Unix"
* Richard Feynman - "Introduction to Computers" (fm. Lectures on Computation)
* Hafner and Lyon - "Hacking Away and Hollering" (fm. Where Wizards Stay Up Late)
Any others that should be in that list? Any that shouldn't be? All submissions and comments accepted with gratitude.