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Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

"Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter, which I read when I was 17. I was just getting into serious programming (I would learn C later that year). I had only an inkling about things like recursion, had little appreciation for music outside of Pink Floyd, and lacked any kind of spiritual philosophy that didn't end in simple atheism or nonsense that I stole from science fiction paperbacks.

GEB got me wondering about a lot of things, and showed me how hard science and engineering and art can coexist. It's not a perfect book -- frankly, I find it rather dull reading now -- but it was an eye-opener when I was just starting out.

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I tried to read it in my middle thirties and felt like I wasn't prepared enough to understand it. Should I just go through it without trying to get everything?

Yes. I think it was purposefully designed with multiple threads having their beginnings and ends hidden in the text. Even tells you where one thread ends (where it gets nonsensical). So the start of the book is pretty much just dumping you into the middle of the braid.

The book is basically a Lisp tutorial using metaphors rather than code examples.

It's worth to work through all the "arithmoquinification" and "G's uncle" business to understand how a formula can be physically constructed that asserts its own unprovability. Hofstadter manages to make the material quite accessible.

I think the greatest part about GEB is he'll talk about a topic (that sometimes went over my head) for a chapter and then revisit that same topic in a more approachable way using a dialog between Achilles and a tortoise. Some of those dialogs were some of my most entertaining reads ever.

I must be broken, because everybody seems to think these are the best parts of the book, and I couldn't stand them. I just wanted to get on with it!

I was quite young last I read it. Perhaps it's time to see if I still feel that way.

You are not alone. I've tried to read the book three times in the last twenty years and I always stop reading in one of those Achilles and tortoise sections. I find them utterly silly and boring and always feel like I'm missing the deeper message. I never had a problem understanding the non-story parts though. I don't dare skip the stories though because I'm afraid to miss out on some incredible insight.

First read this thirty years ago. It's a long read, but it's the gentlest explication of Godel that I've read, so well worth it. I only realised recently that the sub title "Eternal Golden Braid" is an acronym anagram of the main title "Godel, Escher, Bach". EGB, GEB...

I think GEB holds up almost 40 years later - it's very much steeped in GOFAI[1] optimism, but the substance of the book, the intersection between math and art, its silliness and approachability, its pure fun, is absolutely as important now as when published.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_artificial_intelligen... i.e. AI that isn't machine learning

I heard good things about this. Just bought it and plan to read it on coming this week.

I read this book every single day on my way to my shitty sales job while getting my CS degree. Enjoy the journey.

I'm a bit envious; I wish I could read it for the first time again. For me, it was one of only a handful of books that made me wonder: how did a mere human mind come up with this?! The build up and self-references are just magical.

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