The Garden of Forking Paths was an amazing piece of literature, especially given the eight pages it was written on. The narrative of Yu Tsun is periodically and beautifully interrupted by Yu Tsun’s thoughts at the time, perhaps my favorite one being “The night was at once intimate and infinite.” There was something captivating about Albert’s story – the effort that Albert took to solve the problem, the simple idea that most people were mistaken about the book and the labyrinth, perhaps mere curiosity – which had me hooked after the third page. I hope to be able to draw in my readers just as quickly.
Computer Lib/ Dream Machines was an interesting albeit somewhat confusing read. I was confused about whether we had the entire Computer Lib section of the book, as it was only two pages and did not enlighten me much at all about how computers worked as I was expecting. I find the Dream Machines portion to be creepily insightful. Not only does our author predict various future technologies like the internet, he is able to analyze effects and prescribe philosophical approaches to programming for it as well as describing at length features which it should provide, like the Xanadu version control machine which resembles today’s Git. I only wish the author was alive today so that he could predict the next 40 years of computing.
