The Diamond Age
The story of an engineer who creates a device to raise a girl capable of thinking for herself reveals what happens when a young girl of the poor underclass obtains the device.
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284recommend
831mentions
596people
2007–2026years
41% recommend52% neutral6% critical
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What Hacker News says
- Thanks for further recommendations. Programming Language Foundations in Agda. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. I made a note to look into these.
Oh I see one of the authors of PLFA is Philip Wadler, whose name I recognize from Haskell and various papers on programming language theory. There's a Lean version of the book too. https://github.com/plfa/plfl
> Working through a proof using a proof checker .. They all come with really sophisticated tools for interacting with the compiler and the code
I have some prior experience developing a specialized code editor for a template language, and remember thinking at the time how much more potential there is for an advanced interface that supports the author, that deeply integrates with type information, documentation, examples, etc. Not just for writing programs and templates, but also for "rich text" and multimedia documents - for example, including music scores, diagrams, graphs.
Speaking of dependently typed languages (whose definition I admit I don't fully grasp yet), it reminds me of a paper I find fascinating and have read multiple times.
Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone - https://arxiv.org/abs/0903.0340
Again I lack the foundational concepts to really understand it to satisfaction. So I'm sure the resources you recommended will be useful on my learning journey.
- Honestly, IMHO it's complete and utter crap compared to the AMAZING, INCREDIBLE work Stephenson did with everything that came before.
Snow Crash? A milestone in modern sci-fi. Diamond Age? A truly incredible work of art! Even lesser stuff like The Big U or In the Beginning Was the Command Line were really, really good.
Then came Cryptonomicon, and it was good too ... but he was already deteriorating into loving the sound of his own voice way too much by then, so you had to wade through a bit to get to the good stuff.
And then there was Anathem ... where he made up half a language and required you to learn it to read the book (and it was like ten zillion pages long). Good writing is NOT about just throwing whatever brilliant ideas you have onto the page ... it's about cutting it down to the good stuff. Stephenson just stopped doing that by the time he got to Anathem.
To be fair, lots of people were willing to wade through all that fake language BS and Stephenson writing 100 words when 10 would do, and they all report loving the book ... but as a complete and utter Stephenson fanatic, even I abandonded him at Anathem.
- I loved Snow Crash, and I still think about Diamond Age fairly often, 20+ years later. The ideas in Diamond Age were really just incredible.
I even enjoyed his first book, the Big U.
But I also agree about Cryptonomicon. After eating up Snow Crash and Diamond Age, I've tried to make it through Cryptonomicon twice and failed. I just can't seem to finish that book.
- I recommend his older stuff to anyone else looking to check him out: Snow Crash is an undeniable classic, Diamond Age was absolutely incredible, and even Zodiac and In the Beginning Was the Command Line are both very good (although the last one is obviously more for computer people).
His newer stuff is very ... verbose. It started with Cryptonomicon (not sci-fi and WAY longer than it should have been) and by the time he got to Anathema he was so full of himself he not only wrote a giant text ... he wrote it in a made-up sub-language he created (and expected you to learn) just to enjoy the story.
He's one of my absolute favorite authors ... or at least he was for the first half of his career.
- 20 years ago I read a The Guardian article about the "top geek novels". I immediately read a bunch of those.
Recently I managed to find the list again, and it's been endless pleasure:
- American Gods -- Neil Gaiman
- Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley
- The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett
- Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks
- Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson
- Cloud Atlas -- David Mitchell
- The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson
- The Dispossessed -- Ursula K Le Guin
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick
- Dune -- Frank Herbert
- Foundation -- Isaac Asimov
- Giles Goat-Boy -- John Barth
- Gravity's Rainbow -- Thomas Pynchon
- The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams
- I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov
- The Illuminatus! Trilogy -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
- The Left Hand of Darkness -- Ursula K Le Guin
- The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick
- Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland
- Neuromancer -- William Gibson
- Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell
- Orlando -- Virgina Woolf
- The Shockwave Rider -- John Brunner
- Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson
- Stand on Zanzibar -- John Brunner
- Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein
- Trouble with lichen - John Wyndham
- UBIK -- Philip Dick
- Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
- Woman on the Edge of Time -- Marge Piercy
(I am creatively interpreting "The Colour of Magic" as "all Discworld", "Dune" as "the six Dune books", etc.)
- Never read Diamond Age huh?
