Paradigm shifts (by alaric)
When I was a kid, I used to read a lot. I'd devour the technical sections of libraries for new things to learn about. Then I got an Internet connection, and tore into academic papers with a vengeance. Then when I left home and got a job, I had money, so I would buy a lot of books on things that I couldn't find in the library.
I look fondly back on when I read things like Henry Baker's paper on Linear Lisp, Foundational Calculi for Programming Langauges, the Clean Book. Or when I first learnt FORTH and Prolog, and when I read SICP or when I learnt about how synchronous logic could implement any state machine.
All of these were discoveries that opened up a new world of possibilities. Mainly, new possibilities of interesting things I could design, which is one of my main joys in life.
However, after a while, I started to find it harder and harder to find new things to learn about. Nearly a decade ago I all but gave up on the hope of finding a good technical book to read when I went into even large bookshops with an academic leaning. I started browsing the catalogues of academic publishers like MIT Press and Oxford University press, picking out good things here and there; that's where most of my Amazon wishlist comes from. But even then, most of the books I find there are merely ones that will give me more detail on things I already know the basics of, rather than wholly new ideas.
But, of course, the underlying problem is that my main field of interest - computer science - has only been pursued seriously for about seventy years. Modern computing (as most people see it) isn't really the product of current computer science research; industry lags far behind academia in many areas. The computer software we run today is primarily based on the produce of academia around the 1960s (imperative object-oriented programming languages, relational databases, operating systems with processes that operate on a filesystem, virtualisation, that sort of thing). This is for a number of reasons (some more valid than others; but, we are catching up, mainly thanks to the social effects of the Internet), but it means that there's little incentive for industry to actually fund more computer science. So the rate of new ideas actually being developed is far less than the rate at which I can satisfy my curiosity by learning them!
One answer is to try and come up with new paradigm-shifting ideas myself. I'm trying, but I'm not really good enough - I can't compete with proper academics who get to spend all day bouncing ideas back and forth with other proper academics; I can't really get my head deep enough into the problem space to see as far as they do. All I can really do is solve second-level problems, such as how to integrate different systems of programming so that one can use the most appropriate one for each part of one's program without suffering too much unpleasantness at the boundary between them.
Which is why, whenever I read something about some fun new deep idea, I have to stretch my mind to encompass it in the first place.
And that's half the fun...
Wed 9th Apr 2008 12:44 pm 
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By @ndy Macolleague, Wed 9th Apr 2008 @ 1:07 pm
Hi,
"Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly))"
I have this one: you can borrow it. Some of the examples are a lot better than others. I particularly like the one about regex parsing and the one about the Microsoft Windows blitter.
Some articles discuss boring subject such as how the number of tabs or spaces you use or the language you write in determines how beautiful your code is: my favourites were ones that ignored all that superficial nonsense and discussed real algorithmic and conceptual beauty.