“Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age”
Paul Graham’s interesting book has a lot of refreshingly iconoclastic ideas around the art and craft of hacking and how that impinges on the Real World, startups, universities, language design, etc. Unfortunately the density of great stuff doesn’t quite justify reading the whole book, but I really liked the chapter called “Revenge of the Nerds” about the “evolution” of programming languages and how they are becoming more Lisp-like, to the point that we’re almost caught up to 1960. Worth a (quick) read for hackers, who will find much to identify with written in a style of discourse that’s natural to them.