Yes! That book was an important contribution in its day. I wrote an appreciation of it here a few years ago:
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For even faster prototyping -- maybe better called experiments -- skip the text files and do everything in memory. Just use the built-in collection types of the programming language. In Python for example, that would be lists, dictionaries, tuples etc, then you can simulate database queries with set comprehension expressions.
Rota was not a boomer; he taught the boomers (and the succeeding generation). The students he is talking about here are the young boomers-to-be. This page is dated 1997 but it reads like a reprint of something written much earlier. I was an undergraduate at Caltech in 1968-72 and this sounds similar to the faculty, students, and workload there at that time.
Regarding WW2, Rota was a child in Italy during the war until his family fled in 1945 to escape the fascists. He reached the US in 1950 via Switzerland and Ecuador [1]. Not really a pampered boomer upbringing.
Can any St John's alums tell us about their experiences with the science and math selections in the curriculum? How did the instructors present them - did they really get into depth with the technical content or just focus on their literary properties and historic background? Were there problem sets where you were asked to infer or calculate the consequences of this material? Do you feel you really understand electromagnetic fields, relativity etc. etc. as a result of studying these?
International Research Conference on the History of Computing, Los Alamos, Jun 10-15 1976, Los Alamos.
There is a 4-page written report on the conference from Apr 1977 here:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3103957?seq=1
Here is a link to a library catalog entry for the 659-page printed conference proceedings, which includes a link 'Borrow It':
http://link.colby.edu/portal/A-history-of-computing-in-the-t...
Here is a link to a library catalog entry for another version of the proceedings, "43 audiocassettes in 3 volumes":
https://www.worldcat.org/title/history-of-computing-1976-jun...
One comment there said, "This is a godsend. Probably the best introductory article on Lisp to date."
Their role was providing vision and getting people and labs funded. Licklider worked at MIT, BBN, and ARPA most prominently in the 1950s and 60s. Taylor worked at ARPA and Xerox PARC in the 1960s and 70s. Both promoted and funded key projects that got interactive computing, personal computing, computer graphics, and computer networking going.
Both were trained in psychology, not computing -- there was no such field as 'computer science' when they were getting started. In fact Licklider played a big part in creating 'computer science' as a field and an academic specialty in the US, by getting ARPA funding for departments at MIT, CMU, and elsewhere that did influential work and trained scientists who became faculty elsewhere.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._R._Licklider
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_(computer_scient...
PS - "dream machine" is the book, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by Mitchell Waldrop
https://web.mat.bham.ac.uk/R.W.Kaye/logic (not very helpful, lots of broken links, just look at the book instead)
I also like Logic in Computer Science by Huth and Ryan, cited in another comment here. It is much more comprehensive and has a lot more about logic applications in computer science.
I found it via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17200163 "... an insanely clever masterpiece of digital design. ... It’s mindbendingly brilliant."
1. https://www.excamera.com/files/j1demo/docforth/
2. https://www.excamera.com/sphinx/fpga-j1.html
Edit - also mentioned here by adastra22, I see.
"... I feel like part of the vanishing breed that thinks a writer should be read and not heard, let alone seen. I think that this is because there seems so often today to be a tendency to put the person in the place of his or her work, to turn the creative artist into a performing one, to find what a writer says about writing somehow more valid, or more real, than the writing itself.
... it seems to me the only way to keep writers writing well, or trying to write well, is to read what we write."
1. in The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings (2002)
I saw this post of his as not so much a criticism of Graham and Arc in particular, as a lament over the tendency in computing to dismiss the good work done in the past and just start over all the time.
I have briefly looked at Arc. It is yet another demonstration of the problem of too strong an ego that cannot live with what somebody else has made. Be it the standard conditionals, nil versus false versus the empty list, or whatever else this purportedly strong ego is too weak to accept, it is nothing more than proof of the core problem of the IT world -- the hardness of its pillars makes them brittle, not strong, so they cannot be used to build upon. What was it that stood so much in the way that Paul Graham could not have accomplished it without creating a new language? Why was creating a new language and starting from scratch better than building on what had come before? Why is the IT world defined by people who are unable to deal with the concepts of continuity, longevity, and design for long-term stability? Why do they believe they are so much smarter than everything that has gone before them, when they clearly are not and repeat mistakes that take years to undo, if not replaced by another stupid "revolution" that itself starts from scratch?
If people built societies the way computer people build communities, we would still live have small warring tribes and no concept of a law that binds all people and absolutely no concept of a constitution that binds lawmakers. For all the talk about the Internet changing the world, we lag the real world by about 40,000 years when it comes to how we make lots of people who do _not_ agree to everything live and work together.
Suddenly, I feel old and tired.
[1] archived at https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/O5Vss_BdSy4/m/t...
There is a lot of this kind of thing in Monty Python -- the pet store owner in the parrot sketch is a good example.
I always thought the Flat Earth Society was a more extended example.
I think he meant people are always busy fiddling with their phones or whatever, but the content they are consuming and producing is uniform and absent any surprises.
The whole two year physics sequence - the lectures where your entire class attended together, always in the same room, three times a week for two years, the homework sets, the sections, the weekly take-home quizzes - were a shared rite of passage, a central part of the Caltech experience for every student. It was difficult for some of us, but we had to persevere - it wasn't optional. A classmate called it 'intellectual boot camp'.