“The best way to communicate from one human being to another is through story,” Knuth said.
Great quote and great insight. Understanding how the brain works and is stimulated augments communication. Especially important for dry, theoretical subjects.
Let’s not forget Aldus Manutius. His orders of magnitude cheaper books than Gutenberg made books available to regular people. He can be seen as inventor of paperback books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldus_Manutius
I think to understand the difference between the two notes is context. Like the word ‘read’. The same word is pronounced different according to context. ‘I read the book’ vs ‘Did you read the book’.
When you read music you expect a e flat not a d sharp and vise versa
The threshold for starting new research projects from scrath is getting much higher all the time. When Smalltalk was developed you could implement most of the software stack in a quite small team in a few years. I’m not sure that is possible anymore if you want to connect to outer world eg. web. You will create dependencies out of your control quite fast. These dependencies will shape design decisions. Lowest common denominator rules and fighting that will take considerable resources and effort. I think this is one reason we are stuck with Unix like file based systems for most foreseeable future