So long, and thanks for all the fish

What Hacker News says

1. andyjohnson0Jul 2024
   I remember listening to hhgttg on my parent's kitchen radio as a young child. I didnt't get much of the humour but the episodes were still a marvel to me: just bursting and fizzing with ideas and fun.

   I bought the book with pocket money in '79 when it came out - I remember the kind of oilslick-pattern cover, and being secretly pleased that no-one I knew had heard of it. I read it until it fell apart. His proof of the non-existence of god was probably my first Mobius loop, at least until I discovered Hofstadter in the library.

   Teenage me was unexpectedly charmed by So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and was perhaps a little hopeful of meeting someone like Fenchurch one day.

   So, a part of my nerd hustory I guess - albeit not something I've thought about for a while. Thank you Mr Adams.

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2. EvanAndersonMay 2025
   I am reminded of the humorous quote from Douglas Adams' novel "So Long and Thanks For All the Fish":

   Eskimos had over two hundred different words for snow, without which their conversation would probably have got very monotonous. So they would distinguish between thin snow and thick snow, light snow and heavy snow, sludgy snow, brittle snow, snow that came in flurries, snow that came in drifts, snow that came in on the bottom of your neighbor’s boots all over your nice clean igloo floor, the snows of winter, the snows of spring, the snows you remember from your childhood that were so much better than any of your modern snow, fine snow, feathery snow, hill snow, valley snow, snow that falls in the morning, snow that falls at night, snow that falls all of a sudden just when you were going out fishing, and snow that despite all your efforts to train them, the huskies have pissed on.

   It's funny but makes a decent argument for the same thing you are. Seems perfectly natural to me.

   (Also, any excuse to quote Douglas Adams is worth it...)

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3. bigstrat2003Mar 2025
   I definitely felt like the series dropped off hard after Life, The Universe, And Everything. So Long And Thanks For All The Fish was kind of meandering, and Mostly Harmless was just plain depressing and a terrible ending for the series. So my personal advice would be to stop after the third book.
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4. VegenoidJun 2024
   "Man has always assumed that he is more intelligent than dolphins because he has achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But, conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons."

   - Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

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5. jimmySixDOFFeb 2024
   The title is an allusion to "So long, and Thanks for All the Fish", a book by Douglas Adams.

   (For those HNers not steeped in the HHGTTG trilogy of six books)

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6. gwdSep 2023
   In "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish", there's a forward Douglas Adams wrote for a book by another author which was unfinished. He related two stories: the first about an ancient Greek poet who would spend the morning reciting verse, which one of his disciples would write down; then he'd spend the afternoon throwing the vast majority of it away. The second was about another author who'd type out a page of a novel and stick it on his wall near the bottom; every so often he'd page off the wall, type in an improved version, and put it on the wall a little higher, until all the pages were at the top.

   His point (speaking about the other author) was that the book was "unfinished" both in the sense of incomplete, but also "unfinished" in the sense of unpolished; it was a warning that the quality of the writing would not be the quality the readers were used to from that author.

   (Which was apropos to include in "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish", since it was also a novel started by Adams and not "finished", in either sense.)

   It's a hard thing to do, to just sit and write something you feel is garbage. I think I've mostly managed to get to the point where I can do it for coding, but not really for text yet.

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