Books from the library of Erik Naggum
Richard Phillips
posting.
As many of will recall, just under a year ago, Erik Naggum died.
I am a bookseller and acquired Erik's library from his family last
year.
Any of you who would like to receive a catalogue of the books in pdf
format, please email me at this address: tinybook AT gmail.com.
Many thanks,
Richard Phillips
book seller.
RG
<407cc17e-850b-43ff...@z33g2000vbb.googlegroups.com>,
Richard Phillips <tiny...@gmail.com> wrote:
Or you can get it here (posted with permission):
http://www.flownet.com/ron/Cat_Naggum.06.10.pdf
rg
Pascal J. Bourguignon
If I had money enough to buy the whole library...
This gives me an idea for an interesting experiment. Buy the whole
library, and give it to read to a young programmer, and see if we can
turn him a Naggum v.2.0?
--
__Pascal Bourguignon__
http://www.informatimago.com
Zach Beane
That seems to me to mix up cause and effect.
Zach
Pascal J. Bourguignon
That's the question!
Does the reading make the man, or does the man choose the reading?
Harald Hanche-Olsen
> Does the reading make the man, or does the man choose the reading?
I would have thought it obvious that the answer is yes to both.
If reading doesn't change you, what is the point of reading?
--
* Harald Hanche-Olsen <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
-- Bertrand Russell
Pascal J. Bourguignon
> + p...@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon):
>
>> Does the reading make the man, or does the man choose the reading?
>
> I would have thought it obvious that the answer is yes to both.
> If reading doesn't change you, what is the point of reading?
Hence my proposal for a Naggum 2.0 ! :-)
--
__Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
Tim X
> + p...@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon):
>
>> Does the reading make the man, or does the man choose the reading?
>
> I would have thought it obvious that the answer is yes to both.
> If reading doesn't change you, what is the point of reading?
but reading is not sufficient in an dof itself. You have to be 'active'
in your reading to comprehend the content. However, there is something
even more fundamental and difficult to define. I believe each person
responds in different ways to different writing styles. For example, I
always found Knuth's books very good, but I know others who don't and
who prefer authors that I find less accessible. I found the same thing
with other areas of study as well - after a time you would find certain
authors who presented things in such a way that the concepts and ideas
they are writing about fit well with your own cognitive models and you
tend to 'get it' from what they have written much faster than you would
from someone else. .
I learnt a long time ago that sometimes, when trying to understand
something new and unfamiliar, it wasn't necessarily just because I was
being a bit 'thick' that I was having trouble understanding it,
particularly the more subtle aspects. Since others seemed to
be getting it, it isn't just that the author is a poor writer. Rather,
it is due to a disconnection between the authr and reader's cognitive
models. continuing with that author is unlikely to change matters. A
better result is usually found by finding another author. Sometimes,
this can be difficult - especially when dealing with new topics that
have not been dealt with by many writers.
Tim
--
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au
Giovanni Gigante
Btw,
I see that there are several books on Ada in Erik's library. Some days
ago I happened to look at the debian language shootout benchmarks, and I
noticed that Ada is really fast. I also learned that the language had
the standard update recently (2005).
I don't know nearly anything about Ada, except the usual rumors
(verbose, strict discipline, formerly mandated by DOD) which are
probably as rich and precise as "Lisp is slow" and "Lisp is for AI".
So I was wondering: (a) Is ada still alive (in the sense of: is ada more
or less alive than common lisp)? (b) Is ada still worth learning (for a
lone european lisper such I am)?
Pascal J. Bourguignon
It is put to some use in embedded systems.
It's not a bad Algol-like programming language.
(It beats C and C++, but what language doesn't?)
One thing of interest is that it includes at the language level
(therefore portably) threads and inter-thread communication
primitives.
Now, whether there are more Ada jobs than Lisp jobs, I'm not even sure
it's the case...
Captain Obvious
PJB> Does the reading make the man, or does the man choose the reading?
I think for this purpose human brain can be visualized as a finite state
machine:
next_state_of_mind = F(previous_state_of_mind, a bit of experience),
Where experience can be anything, including book reading.
So, it is true that books change a person, but effect depends on previous
experience.
Moreover, it might be important what order do you read books in.
So it is like dynamic, chaotic system, and it is not possible to predict the
behaviour looking only on some part of inputs.
Nick Keighley
this link implies there's still life
http://www.ada-europe.org/
and this page lists some projects that use it
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/ada-project-summary.html
both Boeing and Airbus seem to be heavy users
--
"High Integrity Software: The SPARK Approach to Safety and Security"
Customers interested in this title may also be interested in:
"Windows XP Home"
(Amazon)
jos...@lisp.de
Luckily a prominent Lisp expert explains the real background of Ada
and its design:
http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/sigplannotices/gigo-1997-04.html
Giovanni Gigante
> Luckily a prominent Lisp expert explains the real background of Ada
> and its design:
>
> http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/sigplannotices/gigo-1997-04.html
>
Funny :)
Still, my heuristic was very simple: if the archlisper Erik Naggum was
(apparently) interested in Ada, perhaps I should, too?
Tim Bradshaw
> Still, my heuristic was very simple: if the archlisper Erik Naggum was
> (apparently) interested in Ada, perhaps I should, too?
I suspect Erik bought books on things so he could learn enough about
them to decide if they were interesting. I do that, anyway.
RG
Giovanni Gigante <gi...@cidoc.iuav.it> wrote:
That's not a very good heuristic. He was interested in Ayn Rand too.
ObAda: the AACS (attitude and articulation control system) on the
Cassini spacecraft is programmed in Ada, and it actually has a lot of
pretty sophisticated autonomy built in to handle hardware failures.
It's actually some of the most advanced flight software ever on an
unmanned spacecraft. Ironically, none of its advanced capabilities have
ever been exercised (as far as I know) because, remarkably, none of the
hardware on Cassini has ever failed.
rg
Don Geddis
> In article <4c07a7dd$0$31378$4faf...@reader1.news.tin.it>,
>> Still, my heuristic was very simple: if the archlisper Erik Naggum was
>> (apparently) interested in Ada, perhaps I should, too?
>
> That's not a very good heuristic. He was interested in Ayn Rand too.
Rand went too far, and was blind about her own failures, it's true.
On the other hand, she had a lot of good, important, things to say,
which were (and often still are) very unpopular.
I think it would be an impoverished student who managed to get through
college with no exposure to Ayn Rand.
_______________________________________________________________________________
Don Geddis http://don.geddis.org/ d...@geddis.org
At a book burning, don't leave too soon, or you might miss the dictionaries.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey [1999]
Evans Winner
In article <4c07a7dd$0$31378$4faf...@reader1.news.tin.it>,
Giovanni Gigante <gi...@cidoc.iuav.it> wrote:
Funny :) Still, my heuristic was very simple: if the
archlisper Erik Naggum was (apparently) interested
in Ada, perhaps I should, too?
That's not a very good heuristic. He was interested in
Ayn Rand too.
Wow, an attempted cheap shot at three people at once, two of
them dead. Impressive.
In any case, A) owning the complete works of Plato doesn't
make me a Platonist, B) the heuristic is perfectly
reasonable as long as it remains merely a heuristic, and C)
Naggum certainly was no Objectivist.
Espen Vestre
> C) Naggum certainly was no Objectivist.
Certainly not in recent years, but at one point I think he was.
Have you read this:
http://open.salon.com/blog/kent_pitman/2010/01/08/erik_naggum_on_atlas_shrugged
?
--
(espen)
Evans Winner
I hadn't. There are some interesting bits. To launch into
a discussion of how profoundly anti-Randian it is would be
off topic and pointless. Suffice to say that most people
who read Rand read her very casually and typically what they
remember are some out-of-context bits about society,
politics and capitalism; the crucial ideas they sort of
gloss over and forget. It is clear that Naggum was never an
Objectivist in a very meaningful sense of the term, but as I
say he makes some interesting observations.