Ten Challenges

Nominally a reading list, and for nine entries it behaves like one, albeit a funny one. Steve likens finishing Gödel, Escher, Bach to "trying to eat a molten chocolate fudge cake the size of a minivan," stages an imaginary job interview with Donald Knuth in which he faints before asking a single question, and orders working programmers not to read How to Design Programs (his reasoning is sound, and slightly insulting). He also argues at #2 that new CS students simply aren't ready for Lisp, then spends entry #9 urging complete non-programmers to learn Scheme; the two positions never quite meet.

Entry #10 is where the book reviewing stops. Okasaki gets barely two sentences before a year of stored-up frustration with Amazon's hundred million lines of code takes over: an informal survey of some thirty directors and senior engineers who all gave Steve the same one-word diagnosis of the company's availability problems, a detour through von Neumann, and the Geoworks confession — Steve and a cohort of future Amazonians spent five to ten years writing an entire operating system in 80x86 assembly, and "everyone thought this was a great idea until we went out of business." The gripe here about IDE-generated architecture ("everyone wants to be an architect") is one he promises to blog about properly someday, a promise he kept the following year with Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns. Even the publication is a confession: Steve capped the list at ten to have a shot at finishing the essay before the end of 2004, then admits in the intro that it is now January 22nd.