Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare

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1. stew-jAug 2022
   The Internet is an easy target for blame, but in fact in the past month I found a number of people whose thinking (at least on some specific topic) was near to mine through Reddit discussions (and now you, it seems):

   https://www.github.com/kaveh808

   https://gitlab.com/flatwhatson/guile-prescheme

   If you are interested in the nature of machine code and assembly language I would recommend at least looking at Scheme86:

   https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6042

   It's like a Scheme interpreter running on hardware, and the latest successor to Steele/Sussman's Scheme-on-a-chip--I'm working on microcoding it with my inferior S-assembly. :) I didn't think you were being insulting--my last refuge in an increasingly humorless world appears to be self-deprecating humor.

   Have you reached out to John Cowan, who is working on the R7RS Large Scheme standard, and is interested in topics like auxiliary human language as well as computer language and their representation? I'm not serious enough, I'm afraid, for the Scheme community (see above)--but they might take you more seriously:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Cowan

   Another Scheme person, Jonathan Rees, was (or still may be) at a forward-thinking institute called "Ronin Institute"--I'm not sure what their process is for onboarding scholars but they might be interested in your work:

   https://ronininstitute.org

   Elmer Hanks wrote a forward thinking book many years ago called "Enterprises of Great Pith and Moment: A Proposal for a Universal Human Language" (my Shakespeare quote), about his machine readable, sign-language friendly, auxiliary language, and is worth a look in your domain of study.

   I have been meaning to re-install Whitaker's Words which I used frequently in my own study of Latin, but lost when I upgraded my OS. You might have heard of Ido, an auxiliary language designed by Louis Couturat, a French logician, and the successor to Esperanto. It's almost completely regular, and I thought it might be a start for a more human-language neutral Scheme implementation (it is a Eurocentric language, so not completely neutral, unfortunately). My middle-school English teacher in 1981 pointed at the Esperanto booth in the language arts faire we took a field trip to and said, "I don't know why that booth is always so disappointingly unattended." I guess "ain't much changed", right?

   I recommend "Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare" if you haven't read it:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov%27s_Guide_to_Shakespear...

   and maybe we should both just continue to choose "to be" rather than "not to be".

   [edit]

   I was talking this over with my wife, and after reading your links, I still don't completely understand the overall advantage of coding word stems rather than characters. It did remind me of the first computer I owned, a Sinclair ZX-81 I built from a kit. Its Basic keywords, FOR, GOSUB, RETURN were each represented as a bytecode--and I think you could enter with a special key modifier with one key-chord. Is this like what you are saying?

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2. owynSep 2024
   I was looking at my parent's bookshelf and saw a book on Shakespeare and I recognized the author's name: Asimov!

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov's_Guide_to_Shakespeare

   It's like 800 pages, I haven't read it but I think I'll keep that one. Seems like it might be hard to find another physical copy. He was definitely prolific on a number of topics.

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3. AlbertCoryJun 2023
   Favorite quote by Azimov:

   He was on some talk show, and the host asked why he wrote Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare: aren't there already thousands of books about Shakespeare?

   He said, "Yeah, but not by me."

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4. AlbertCoryNov 2022
   Isaac Asimov wrote "Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare" and some talk show host asked him "Why did you write this? There are thousands of books about Shakespeare!"

   He said, "Yeah, but not by me."

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5. handrousDec 2021
   The language takes some getting used to. Watching a performance is easier than reading it, since (again) you have the context of the actor's physical performance, delivery, the setting of the scene, et c., to inform your understanding. Another thing is that often his plays rely on some historical understanding for full effect. For example, most people reading the beginning of Hamlet might not fully grasp what's going on, while someone with a good understanding of feudal politics (or anyone who's played much Crusader Kings) will be going "oh shit, this is really bad". This is where something like Asimov's guide to Shakespeare, or any number of free online lectures about the plays, can be helpful.

   As for what's great:

   1) Masterful plotting, leaving just enough up to the audience to figure out (and, more often than not, leveraging that for ironic purposes).

   2) Outstanding characterization.

   3) A hard-to-pin-down quality that makes relating episodes, characters, and exchanges in his plays to real life the most natural thing in the world. There's a reason we've ended up with so many of his characters and phrases as parts of the English language itself.

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6. ncmncmMar 2021
   Sigh. Isaac Asimov was willing to write about anything at all, whether he understood it or not.

   As a teen I read Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare, Asimov's Guide to Humor, and a good fraction of the other 200 books he had published up to then. He more than doubled that number before he died. He was careful about his facts, though he had a policy not to look anything up anywhere but his own bookshelf. He also would not use vehicles: if he couldn't walk there, he wouldn't go. That was possible in New York.

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