I am of the generation that fixated upon GEB as some sort of deep wisdom, and I have a nostalgic fondness for it. I certainly credit it for sparking a lot of my curiosity about Lisp.

But in hindsight, its value to me was not in the content of the book, as much as in communicating the kind of delight and curiosity around programming that has kept me interested in the subject since 1972 or so.

Other books have done the same thing for me, most notably everything by Martin Gardner, Raymond Smullyan's books about logic puzzles that sneak an education past you, and William Poundstone's books about Game Theory and Computability.

In a way, I'm delighted that this book is not sitting as the number one thread so far. Not because it's terrible, but because new generations ahve written great books, and they deserve mention too.