Name: Ideas that changed the world
ISBN: 9780789496096

Ideas that changed the world

Presents the big themes in philosophy and history, and reveals how certain ideas have shaped our civilization. Respected historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto offers an unashamedly personal analysis on a wide range of ideas--from the afterlife to taboo foods--that will keep readers enthralled.--From publisher description.

What Hacker News says

jlduggerAug 2022

Just this week while going through the book _Ideas That Changed the World_ I read the original paper on LISP[1]. I have to say this magazine article reads a bit cleaner. But that's kind of the fun of the book -- learning to decode the excited yet formal language of computational innovation over time.

The book traces out what are effectively conversations across decades (or centuries if you include Aristotle). So when you see McCarthy name drop Church's lambda calculus, you know how it ties into a conversation about Hilbert's decidability problem, and that self-reference ("recursion") is a fundamental tool.

And from the perspective of now, you see that this is the first encounter with automatic garbage collection, describing a simple mark and sweep algo. The BYTE magazine covers a more advanced garbage collector, Lambdino, which assumes a massive amount of familiarity with LISP and internals than the previous article comparing LISP and LOGO.

[1]: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.pdf

thread

mjklinJul 2016

Where I'm Reading From, by Tim Parks

The Inevitable, by Kevin Kelly

Ideas that Changed the World, by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

A Reader's Manifesto, by B.R. Myers

Framed!, by Hari Singh

Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

Why Education is Useless, by Daniel Cottom

The New Diary, by Tristine Rainer

Raising a Happy, Unspoiled Child, by Burton White