[mlangdon]

I for one would have loved to have had the author as my AP teacher. Senior year was when I discovered (in the Columbian sense) David Foster Wallace, who would not exist as such without Pynchon. It would be a couple of years and attempts before I could get into Pynchon, but when I got to it, Gravity's Rainbow was an ecstatic experience.

David Foster Wallace writes (in an essay collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again) about the connection for him between higher math and logic and writing fiction. About the "click" that happens when things fall into place. For several years, I chased exactly that in fiction, before returning to my teenage passion for programming. I was immensely pleased to find the same "click" in software. The same challenges of world creation, of collecting, balancing and combining incongruent, contradictory and abstract thoughts in my head before committing them to screen.

What I'm suggesting is Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and, let's add, William Gass, are programmers' writers.