[agumonkey]

Hi drostie, you read SICM ? I'm still wondering how good it is, it felt mind blowing for a CS guy, but it's so rarely mentioned that I thought it was more like an exercise by the author.

Also, out of curiosity do you know non English books of rare quality ?

[drostie]

Hey, sorry this took me a while to respond to -- I have a script which polls HN to custom-order the posts I see, so I am not often on the main site.

SICM is basically a mainline classical mechanics textbook of the form that I was able to do my Bachelor's in, but combined with some tantalizing snippets of Lisp code which make it seem like there's something deeply interesting there, too. There's a magical feeling where you're like "holy crap if I could nail down the mathematical notation a little more and get some of these routines as efficient library built-ins, this would be like a programming sandbox that could teach a student physics by direct interaction."