Oddly enough, the copy I read as a child was a pre-press unbound proof, my dad had received for review purposes (he was a professor of computer science and a mathematician) he, my elder brothers and sisters my mother and I were all blown away by it. An amazing tour de force. Possibly the best pop Sci book of it's time. (4 of the six of us were in compsci and the other two in visual arts and music so almost any of it worked somewhere, somehow for us. All three fields right there in the title)
This wonderful book pushed me to study computer science after mechanical engineering
- 20yrs later I can’t really see that being a software engineer's has anything in common subject wise with this masterpiece but I think the new current AI age and and GPT has so lent many new observations that lead me back this masterpiece
- too many software engineers are puzzle solvers and creative builders, focused only on iterations of code and solving business problems not enough philosophers in field in my opinion to give a wholistic view - so there is a heavy undercurrent of artisan worker ethic in the software world (rightly so given the nature of the work) but it also tends to look down at academia and philosophy and not enough deeper thought on implications that everything in the world is Turing compatible and that our world is an amazing and wonderful place
> This review is mostly structured around I Am a Strange Loop, which conveniently also serves as a review of the major themes of GEB. Consider this a low stakes bait-and-switch, for which I hope you'll forgive me.
Not forgiven; IaaSL was a disappointment after GEB.
Oddly enough, the copy I read as a child was a pre-press unbound proof, my dad had received for review purposes (he was a professor of computer science and a mathematician) he, my elder brothers and sisters my mother and I were all blown away by it. An amazing tour de force. Possibly the best pop Sci book of it's time. (4 of the six of us were in compsci and the other two in visual arts and music so almost any of it worked somewhere, somehow for us. All three fields right there in the title)
This wonderful book pushed me to study computer science after mechanical engineering
- 20yrs later I can’t really see that being a software engineer's has anything in common subject wise with this masterpiece but I think the new current AI age and and GPT has so lent many new observations that lead me back this masterpiece
- too many software engineers are puzzle solvers and creative builders, focused only on iterations of code and solving business problems not enough philosophers in field in my opinion to give a wholistic view - so there is a heavy undercurrent of artisan worker ethic in the software world (rightly so given the nature of the work) but it also tends to look down at academia and philosophy and not enough deeper thought on implications that everything in the world is Turing compatible and that our world is an amazing and wonderful place
> This review is mostly structured around I Am a Strange Loop, which conveniently also serves as a review of the major themes of GEB. Consider this a low stakes bait-and-switch, for which I hope you'll forgive me.
Not forgiven; IaaSL was a disappointment after GEB.