I'm a CS grad student at Caltech. My absolute favorite intro theory book (the one I recommend to undergrads and people just starting out) is Algorithms by Vazirani, Dasgupta, and Papadimitriou. Extremely well written and a great selection of topics.
Hey Walter, I really admire your work. I'm curious though, do you think D is potentially in danger of trying to do too many things? No one wants another mess like C++.
I used to run Debian, but I switched to Fedora a few years ago and haven't looked back. Fedora is always sleek and up-to-date, unlike Debian, which due to its outdated packages always ends up looking like the plain step-sister. I also strongly prefer DNF to apt. With that being said, they both play crucial roles in the Linux ecosystem - Debian being the base for Ubuntu and Mint, and Fedora being the distribution which upstreams the most code.
Used to code quite a bit in Haskell, but I've moved on. I believe in the philosophy "Simple things should be easy, hard things should be possible"; Haskell forgets the first part.
Wow, this is the end of an era! Guido has had an extraordinary impact on the direction of Python and software engineering more generally, and I thank him for his contributions.
I'm a PhD student in CS at Caltech. Last year we had 600 applications, interviewed ten candidates, and made exactly one offer. I shared this on Facebook and all my profs started making fun of it.
One data point: I was at Georgia Tech for undergrad, now at Caltech for a CS PhD. Both are good schools, but Caltech is definitely considered more "elite". As a Caltech student, I definitely attract attention that I just didn't get at a Georgia Tech student.
These demos are cool but really highlight the fact that we are decades away from quantum computers that perform useful work.. So far all I've seen are parlor tricks.