Alan Kay's reading list

There are means of achieving reading without any reading too. Have you tried audio books? I haven't, my mind drifts too much in audio books, but some friends swear by them.

I've also noticed that reading in the office attracts strange looks sometimes. I don't know what to do about that. Reading research papers and text books related to what one is working on should be encouraged in a knowledge profession, yet I almost never see colleagues doing it. I guess if your hands aren't on the keyboard those JIRA tickets won't get closed.

Once it becomes a habit, it's easy to maintain. I'd feel weird if I didn't do it at this point.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Attention-Merchants-Scramble-Inside-H...

Why do you want to do something about it?

I used to read books a lot as a child, but stopped in my teens and have more recently found them more rewarding per unit of time than much of what I find on the internet. I think this started when I realised you can actually buy a copy of The Origin of Species, and so I did. The insights and justifications for evolution presented in that book are much greater than any summary I've ever found online. Things like the imperfection of the fossil record, the importance of one species on the state of an ecosystem, distribution of related species due to geological processes, and so much more. It was a difficult but rewarding book to read, and solidified the importance of reading books for me.

I do however suffer from the same lack of motivation and time to invest as you, so I select my books and allocate time appropriately. Currently I set a goal to read for either half an hour, or one chapter of a book, at least once every couple of days. If the book grabs me I may read more, and I feel I can justify that investment quite often. If it doesn't, I may have to put it aside for another time. I find this habit often draws me toward my next book as I am nearing the end of one, however it needs to be one that feels interesting or important to me. If it's not, then it just won't get read.

My solution was to drastically cut back my internet use most of the time I'd have spent online reading books instead. I do what I need to online for work, and I browse HN once a day to keep up with the latest and greatest.

I've found that my attention span returned relatively quickly, and reading books for hours at a time became easy again. The neat thing is that the increased attention span didn't just apply to books. I'm able to get more done at work, too, by staying locked on to whatever I'm doing and not getting distracted.

[1]https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/d...

To me, it's next to impossible to compete with the web.

I vacationed in a wonderful place with no internet access. I read a 600 page book effortlessly and with great joy. It was a remarkable feeling. It has always been hard for me to read long books, even articles. But with broadband in my pocket, it's just too hard

Trying to read convoluted prose front to back without a specific goal, and without having a general idea of what the author is trying to say ahead of time is pretty much a recipe for fail.

On the other hand, I'll happily do a cover to cover on pop-sci book with tight prose that covers experimental findings in plain english.

I intend to do that from time to time as the to-read list is growing :D

I commute on the train, and spent a bunch of time playing with code / reading info. I now mix it up with reading a book. It's been good, I feel it enhances my intellectual energies rather than drains them.

Don't believe me well zookeeper - paxos, riak - dynamo paper, cassandra - dynamo paper, go's CSP - hoares paper, Concurrent ML CSP - Hoares paper, bit torrent - kademlia, dynamo - chord, swim, b+ tree papers the list goes on and on

As for outside of that I used to read a lot of novels and books on philosophy until I was like 18, now I just read really fucked up Seinen Manga.

But like guys who are writing the compilers,servers, concurrency paradigms, etc. that you use have to read a lot even if it's limited to Tech.

(For me, Alan Kay is good publicist for other geniuses. He's talked about Ivan Sutherland, Neil Postman, etc. I was overlooking those people until I started watching his talks on Youtube.)

It's true that his specific outputs there (Smalltalk, Squeak, etc.) have never become that mainstream. But: 1) they have become much more widely used than a lot of other research systems (Smalltalk is not just some PhD thesis used by 3 people), and 2) being even "highly influential" on two major areas of development that are mainstream-important is a pretty high bar to clear already.

The Smalltalk VM led to Sun working on the Self VM which led to the JVM.

First thing first is that he's a pretty great talker. That ensures anyone will even take the time to listen to what he has to say. But unlike some other great talkers/writers in our field with slavish devotion, Alan Kay was part of pioneering cutting edge research into personal computing. To me he's a breath of fresh air. He's not trying to sell hocus pocus methodologies at software conferences, he's taking a holistic, big picture view of computing and offers some crazy ideas - not all of which I agree with, but most of which have some merit.

His view that computing is an immature field and we don't yet know what we are doing really resonates with me. People too often try and treat it like it's something mature like the electrical engineering or mathematics that underpins it, but it's totally not. We're still in the stage where we are constantly forgetting our history because we're stuck in fashion cycles (ie, people calling Swift innovative because it takes ideas from 1970s programming languages). And he rightly shines a light on that and says hey, we can and should aim to do better. For that I applaud him.

He can be a bit esoteric and out there and what he says is often not directly applicable to everyday programmers. I totally agree. But from thousand foot view strategic perspective he's well worth listening to.

"For pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing." [1]

[1] http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/kay_3972189.cfm