At the beginning of this year, a friend had forwarded a list of things to do this year. One of them was 'Read a difficult book'. I guess I can confidently put a check against this one - I just finished reading 'Patterns Of Software' by Richard Gabriel. To be accurate, it's not actually a book. Rather, it is a collection of essays that appeared in the Journal Of Object-Oriented Programming, somewhere in the distant 90s. Though many of them talk about how 'Patterns Of Architecture' popularized by architect Christopher Alexander apply to the world of software, there are others that talk about the size of computer languages, their history, productivity etc.
To be fair, I hadn't expected to grasp 100% of the material. And some parts of many chapters simply sounded too abstruse. But the article that totally stumped me was 'The Bead Games, Rugs and Beauty'. I tried to make sense of it, I really did. But my grey matter was just not upto the task. Much as I like leaving things unfinished, I had to abandon reading the chapter. Must say that this chapter is mainly responsible for my completing the 'Read a difficult book' part of this year's to-do list. :-)
And I was thinking that the honor would go to Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History Of Time' :-)
To be fair, I hadn't expected to grasp 100% of the material. And some parts of many chapters simply sounded too abstruse. But the article that totally stumped me was 'The Bead Games, Rugs and Beauty'. I tried to make sense of it, I really did. But my grey matter was just not upto the task. Much as I like leaving things unfinished, I had to abandon reading the chapter. Must say that this chapter is mainly responsible for my completing the 'Read a difficult book' part of this year's to-do list. :-)
And I was thinking that the honor would go to Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History Of Time' :-)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment