Alan Kay's Reading List

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AlanKaysReadingList

by lazydon • 12 years ago

201 59 12 years ago

c2.com

applecore• 12 years ago

Should we add Human Universals to this list?

unphasable• 12 years ago

seems impossible to find, at least last time I checked.

bennesvig• 12 years ago

Here's Alan Kay talking about The Inner Game of Tennis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50L44hEtVos

avodonosov2• 12 years ago

super! thanks

arethuza3• 12 years ago

Even more than Cosmos I regard The Ascent of Man as the documentary series that had the biggest impact on me - I was probably only 8 when it was shown on the BBC, but I can still remember watching it, particularly this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0PDGZKGAWs

NB The Leó Szilárd he mentions was the Hungarian physicist who had the original idea for an atomic bomb while crossing a road in London in 1933, as Richard Rhodes described it:

"The stoplight changed to green. Szilárd stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woes, the shape of things to come."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le%C3%B3_Szil%C3%A1rd

doomrobo• 12 years ago

Surprised GEB isn't in there

coolsunglasses3• 12 years ago

Many didn't like GEB and found it a bit vacuous and longer than the material merited.

hhm• 12 years ago

That's me. I can understand why people like it, but I found more rigorous materials on the same subject to be a lot more interesting.

jacobolus• 12 years ago

Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=664324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=92007

gabriel• 12 years ago

Did you all see at the bottom: "COMPUTERS (most of the good stuff is still in papers, here are a few books)"

Most of the good stuff is still in paper!

MichaelGG• 12 years ago

In papers, meaning not published books but papers in journals.

avodonosov2• 12 years ago

I can't even complete this list, how can he read all these books...

mindcrime2• 12 years ago

Well, Alan Kay isn't a young guy. Presumably, he's been reading for many years. Knock out a couple a year and you should be good to go.

On the flip side, remember this any time you read someone else's "recommended reading list"... if YOU sat down and wrote your "recommended reading list" it would probably also be very long and impressive as well.. it would just (probably) have a lot of different titles on it.

elviejo• 12 years ago

He learnt to read when he was an infant.. I remember clearly in a conference he said: "... by the time I got to school I have read a couple of hundred books ..."

interstitial2• 12 years ago

I've read most of them, close to 90% -- and I still suck at life. Your mileage will vary.

staccatomeasure• 12 years ago

Read some literature.

laxatives6• 12 years ago

It says Alan Kay has a library of 5000 books. Do you have 5000 books?

ryannevius• 12 years ago

0.9 * 5000 != 5000

Arcanum-XIII2• 12 years ago

You don't have to own a book to have read it - library, friend lending you book, and so on are all great way to get and share information. We often forget that in our current digital age, swapping as always been easy since Guttenberg.

interstitial2• 12 years ago

Actually my library is closer to 10,000.

gyepi2• 12 years ago

Not knowing you, I can only suggest questions to ask your self.

What yardstick are you using to determine your level of suckage? Is it true? How do you know? If it is true, do you care? If you care, in what way do you care? Does it matter? If it matters, is it important? How so? Hopefully, the books you have read will help with the answers. You may not be able to answer all of these questions (and honestly, the answers don't matter too much), but they might serve to orient you.

I have read a fair number of the books on the list (and many more not on the list) and can truly say that I am a better human being for doing so, according to my criteria.

enen• 12 years ago

I just read his Wikipedia page and his early life. What's the point in even trying at life...

dmoney• 12 years ago

Imagine being Kay and having to watch GUIs get increasingly dumbed down, people using Object Oriented Programming to refer to things nothing like what you created, people not using computers to the full potential you thought you had enabled decades ago. "Guys! You're doing it wrong!"

But this means there's still a lot of room for "innovation" to build on top of his "inventions" (distinction he made in a talk that[1] was posted here yesterday: invention being creating new things, innovation being the task of bringing them to market). Or if that's not your deal, he laid out the kind of environment that's required to create new inventions. You could try to work in such an environment or create one.

It's probably too late to have the same "early life" that he did, but you've learned to read, if you're here you've probably learned to code, and chances are you've still got at least a couple "lives"[2] left in you.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7538063

[2] http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2722

laichzeit02• 12 years ago

I think John von Neumann's early (and later) life is even more incredible.

steveeq1• 12 years ago

He should have listed Sussman's and Abelson's classic "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" in the "Computers" section: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

pfraze• 12 years ago

Three talks by Alan Kay that I highly recommend, particularly the first two: http://pfraze.github.io/2014/03/31/the-mandatory-alan-kay.ht...

dalek2point3• 12 years ago

who does this website belong to? c2.com? really cool domain name, mustve been an early adopter?

mindcrime2• 12 years ago

It belongs to Ward Cunningham, basically. And yeah, I suppose you could say they were early adopters:

  [prhodes@captainchaos ~]$ whois c2.com
  [Querying whois.verisign-grs.com]
  [Redirected to whois.name.com]
  [Querying whois.name.com]
  [whois.name.com]
  Domain Name: C2.COM 
  Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.name.com 
  Registrar URL: http://www.name.com 
  Updated Date: 2013-09-30T16:21:59-06:00 
  Creation Date: 1994-10-23T04:00:00-06:00

sunir• 12 years ago

And that website serving the page is the original wiki, WikiWikiWeb. An incredible piece of Internet history and also an incredible resource for software development mastery.

chokolad• 12 years ago

This is the first wiki ever, invented by Ward Cunnigham.

laxatives6• 12 years ago

How does one even go about reading 5000 books? I know it only says his library is 5000 books, but what's the point in amassing a library if you haven't read it? That would be nearly two books a week for 50 years. Imagine if even 5% of those were text books.

schlagetown• 12 years ago

I like the idea of the "anti-library" — that there can be great value even in unread books:

http://www.matthewcornell.org/blog/2009/4/6/on-keeping-an-um...

Jun8• 12 years ago

To cure you out of this vision of a library I would suggest you read Umberto Eco's essay "How to Justify a Private Library” in How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays, it's great! In The Black Swan Taleb summarizes the lesson from this essay as:

"“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”"

wazoox• 12 years ago

I have a room filled with several thousand books I've read, an a shelf in my bedroom filled with several hundred books I bought to read later. Then I have 2 ebook readers with several hundred other books, some I've read, some I haven't read yet.

As a child, I've been pretty impressed the first time I've been to some friend's home where there was only a few books, the dictionary, the Guinness book of records and a couple of large, picture books that nobody ever reads. I was so alien to me; even at the age of 12 my bedroom had its longest wall entirely covered in bookshelves.

arethuza3• 12 years ago

My mother was a librarian of a small library in a village in Scotland - from about the age of 13 she used to let me take the key and go and take books out myself any time I wanted (subject to the same rules as everyone else about number of books and keeping records).

I still love books :-)

laxatives6• 12 years ago

I think its a neat idea, but completely outdated. You can order a new book you need and get it within a day. A massive library of textbooks you can, at best, hope to glipse through for a few important bits of information, is a much larger financial investment. At that scale, you actually need an entire room devoted to containing your anti-library, taking dozens of hours to set up and organize.

laichzeit02• 12 years ago

I find it hard to believe that anyone could have books on difficult subjects like mathematics, philosophy, etc. and actually read 5000 of them in any contemplative way.

You could spend months alone reading, re-reading, consulting commentaries and attempting to understand Kant's Critique of Pure Reason alone.

Arcanum-XIII2• 12 years ago

And meanwhile, you can complete your reading and contemplating by reading other books - which is the point. 5000 books is not a huge amount if you're curious; for a more contemporary vision, think about the time you've spend browsing from one article to the other on wikipedia - or the web for the matter.

brianstorms2• 12 years ago

Years ago I interviewed Alan at his home in LA. First thing that struck me about his house was the BOOKS, books everywhere, bookshelves everywhere, shelves in every room, every hallway, stacked everywhere, just nonstop books. Of course, as we were walking through the house before we even sat down, I asked about the books. He proudly told me he read a new book every day. On every subject under the sun.

I knew it was gonna be a great interview... it was.

artimaeis• 12 years ago

Any chance you could share that interview?

brianstorms2• 12 years ago

All in good time. That was the first of 3 or 4 interviews I did with him as part of research for my book on the history of the PLATO system, which Alan and a number of PARC folks were keenly aware of and went out and visited (and PLATO folks came out to visit PARC).

I went back and checked the transcript of the interview. He told me he reads "somewhere between 200 and 400 books a year, since I was five or so. Depends on the year. And generally a wide range of genres and things. . . most of the sciences."

vijayr• 12 years ago

One book, every day? How is it sustainable? Did he know of any speed reading/understanding/retaining techniques?

jwdunne• 12 years ago

I think part of it is that he has been reading fluently from a young age. My son can barely recognise his name and he's nearly 4. That's a very good head start in terms of practice. It might also be due to a strong natural ability.

zenbowman• 12 years ago

Didn't know he was in Los Angeles, thanks for letting me know!

solomatov• 12 years ago

It's interesting that there's no single book on math or algorithms there.

gyepi2• 12 years ago

I read The Inner Game of Tennis based on Alan Kay's description in a youtube video. It is an excellent book.

I am glad to see Csikszenmihalyi on the list as well. Flow is a very powerful concept; we all know it, but understanding it and using it effectively is a different matter entirely.

After reading The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh, I realized that all three books are actually talking about the same subject from different perspectives.

To this list, I would add:

anything by Robert Grudin, but especially:

Time and the Art of Living and The Grace of Great Things

How to solve it by G. Polya

Conceptual Blockbusting by James Adams

Nice to see the Mortimer Adler recommendation as well, but I think his How to Read a Book should be a prerequisite for serious reading.

As I've gotten older, I've come to the conclusion that true understanding requires the kind of depth that comes from knowing one's self intimately. It's a lot harder than it sounds, especially for a technologist.

psykotic• 12 years ago

On several occasions, Kay has mentioned Molecular Biology of the Cell as an outstanding example of how modern technology can be used to create textbooks in the aid of comprehension rather than spectacle. An example of vulgar abuse by Kay's standards would be any of the massive, technicolored tomes with names like Calculus or College Physics.

Alan Kay's Reading List

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