Good analysis. I think what maybe bothered me is that Paul mentions mindfulness, being present in the moment, and so on. I personally struggle to explain these concepts to an atheist friend of mine who mixes up these important aspects of everyday being with religious world views. They are separate, and I love to see such elegant essays that do not blend the two dimensions, mindfulness and faith (of any specific or abstract sort).
Before reading the God part, I wanted to forward the essay to family members who you might refer to as belonging to "most people." Because of the God part, I did not.
I think the point of the essay is perfectly made without the final part about God. I found the perfect rhythm of the essay got broken at bit this point, and that's why I'd loved to see it without it.
I am aware this 'God' concept is very abstract. Maybe I should have emphasized the any in 'any form or idea'. Indeed, I do not understand what it adds to this deep and wise essay.
Interesting that you name them 'together'. On the surface, they are doing quite different things. On a deeper level, it seems to me, they approaching things in a very similar manner. I think what they share is a style of work very detached from the hectic, local improvement approach, which is usually forced upon us in industry for efficiency reasons. They inspiringly take their time to dig deep to identify hidden assumptions to get to the root causes of problems. Quite in the sense of the artist or scientist Bertrand Russell thought of. http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/1948_re...
This is a misunderstanding. You can read my question as "According to [..] the SICP is one of the top 10 CS books. Which, do you think, are those?"
I'm just interested because it seems SICP is THE book on programming, and I wonder: Which other CS books are that prominent? The only one I can think of, is "Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach" by Russell and Norvig.
The mini-bio of Gerald Sussman on the right-hand side states that "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs .. is universally acknowledged as one of the top ten textbooks in computer science".
I'm curious why they explicitely speak about the top ten.
A true developer is a competent, intelligent, caring enthusiast. The author presents himself as true developer of the first (computer industry) generation. His language of choice is Common Lisp, which has an unhealthy community full of negativity and egos. Since the author is enthusiastic about CL, he insists that each community member should be a true developer and help CL succeed.
Python is a good language to start. You should definitely avoid BASIC. Quoting E. Dijkstra:
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."