Good books in computer science?

[Chris Jones]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 06:42:50PM EDT, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> In message <mailman.1558.1245010564.8015.python-list at python.org>, Chris 
> Jones wrote:

> > Vivaldi vs. Mozart
> > 
> > And the latter especially had definitely mastered his editor. Just
> > think of the sheer volume of the coding he managed during his short
> > life.
> > 
> > Not many bugs either…
> 
> I thought Vivaldi did more. The style of music was such that they
> could virtually sketch it out in shorthand, and leave it to the
> copyists to expand to proper notation for the musicians to play. I
> imagine that it was also the job of copyists to fix the typos.

100 years before Frederick W. Taylor was born..?

Vivaldi ran a school for musically-minded young women, I heard, so his
alumni may have pitched in. Mozart on the other hand, pretty much must
have spent his days coding. It has been estimated that the fastest
copyist would need years to manually reproduce the sum total of his
manuscripts.

Mind you, that's only stuff I read years ago, and even though I looked
around a bit, I have no evidence to corroborate.

> In other words, high productivity was a direct consequence of adoption
> of a cookie-cutter style.

It looks like we pretty much agree.

You make it sound like it was Vivaldi who invented Pacbase. :-)

Maybe I'm nitpicking, but the one thing I don't understand is how you
practice programming. 

The term makes obvious sense when you're talking about your golf swing,
acquiring competitive driving skills, playing tetris.. 

But programming..?? 

CJ