[COFF] How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World?

[COFF] How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World?

[Stuff Received]

New book from PUP (that I have not read):

   "You Are Not Expected to Understand This": How 26 Lines of Code 
Changed the World
     Torie Bosch, Ed.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691208480/you-are-not-expected-to-understand-this

Anyone here know anything about it?

N.

[COFF] Re: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World?

[Tomasz Rola]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2022 at 01:40:00PM -0400, Stuff Received wrote:
> New book from PUP (that I have not read):
> 
>   "You Are Not Expected to Understand This": How 26 Lines of Code Changed
> the World
>     Torie Bosch, Ed.
> https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691208480/you-are-not-expected-to-understand-this
> 
> Anyone here know anything about it?
> 
> N.

I have only glanced quickly on what was in the page you sent.

>From table of contents - my impression is, there is not a single line
of code in it. Or at least not anything I would want to rewrite into
editor.

They also give an Index on this page. Mentioned are things like
blockchain, bots and bitcoin. More than one mention of Iran, together
with various keywords. FORTRAN && COBOL, few times. Worms.

+1 for talking about RSA and encryption.

-1 for writing about audio compression, video compression but not
 about lossless compression...

Missing from the index, out of my head: algorithm, GNU, more about
Linux (they only seem to mention about expletives in source code),
LISP, Scheme, Perl, security, PGP, Stuxnet, Kevin Mitnick, LOGO,
sorting.

I am not claiming they should have mentioned about missing things -
and since I did not read it, maybe they did, actually. And I am not
claiming that the book is either bad or good, or would be better if
they talked a bit more about thing I did not see in the index.

Might be interesting if one would like to talk about programming to
non-programmers. The book seems to cater to them, and probably tries
to capture their imagination. So, if a programmer goes to a
party... as an invited guest, I mean. He needs to talk about something
or he will not come no more...

If they gave Toc and Index in form of text, I could now have a wet
dream about sorting it all so I could then estimate how much place
maximum is being given for various subjects. For example, there are
many names, known names (Lions, Kotok, PDP-11) and it might give a
clue if they merely gloss over in few sentence on same page, or maybe
write a bit more.

Alas, nothing for me to sort, because those things are in images and I
am not willing to write OCR software just for my amusement :-) ...

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola@bigfoot.com             **