From stuff at riddermarkfarm.ca Sat Oct 29 03:40:00 2022 From: stuff at riddermarkfarm.ca (Stuff Received) Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2022 13:40:00 -0400 Subject: [COFF] How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World? Message-ID: <5ad0b6ec-3217-e4e2-1bef-410f69a50a59@riddermarkfarm.ca> New book from PUP (that I have not read):   "You Are Not Expected to Understand This": How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World     Torie Bosch, Ed. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691208480/you-are-not-expected-to-understand-this Anyone here know anything about it? N. From rtomek at ceti.pl Sat Oct 29 17:21:15 2022 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2022 09:21:15 +0200 Subject: [COFF] How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World? In-Reply-To: <5ad0b6ec-3217-e4e2-1bef-410f69a50a59@riddermarkfarm.ca> References: <5ad0b6ec-3217-e4e2-1bef-410f69a50a59@riddermarkfarm.ca> Message-ID: On Fri, Oct 28, 2022 at 01:40:00PM -0400, Stuff Received wrote: > New book from PUP (that I have not read): > >   "You Are Not Expected to Understand This": How 26 Lines of Code Changed > the World >     Torie Bosch, Ed. > https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691208480/you-are-not-expected-to-understand-this > > Anyone here know anything about it? > > N. I have only glanced quickly on what was in the page you sent. >From table of contents - my impression is, there is not a single line of code in it. Or at least not anything I would want to rewrite into editor. They also give an Index on this page. Mentioned are things like blockchain, bots and bitcoin. More than one mention of Iran, together with various keywords. FORTRAN && COBOL, few times. Worms. +1 for talking about RSA and encryption. -1 for writing about audio compression, video compression but not about lossless compression... Missing from the index, out of my head: algorithm, GNU, more about Linux (they only seem to mention about expletives in source code), LISP, Scheme, Perl, security, PGP, Stuxnet, Kevin Mitnick, LOGO, sorting. I am not claiming they should have mentioned about missing things - and since I did not read it, maybe they did, actually. And I am not claiming that the book is either bad or good, or would be better if they talked a bit more about thing I did not see in the index. Might be interesting if one would like to talk about programming to non-programmers. The book seems to cater to them, and probably tries to capture their imagination. So, if a programmer goes to a party... as an invited guest, I mean. He needs to talk about something or he will not come no more... If they gave Toc and Index in form of text, I could now have a wet dream about sorting it all so I could then estimate how much place maximum is being given for various subjects. For example, there are many names, known names (Lions, Kotok, PDP-11) and it might give a clue if they merely gloss over in few sentence on same page, or maybe write a bit more. Alas, nothing for me to sort, because those things are in images and I am not willing to write OCR software just for my amusement :-) ... -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **