Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "The Most Famous Computer Science Books In The World" video.

  1. That’s one aspect of the books that has not aged well. Basically the entire field of computer architecture has undergone some major winnowing since then. Decimal-centric architectures are gone, and byte addressability is king.
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  2. He got distracted by the woeful state of mathematical typesetting. So he put this project aside to create TEX.
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  3. The fundamental difference, I think, is that in computing we care about the resources our programs use. In maths, the fact that a 1000-decimal-digit integer can be factorized in finite time is something you take for granted, but in computing, the fact that it might take longer than the age of the observable Universe to determine the factors becomes rather important.
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  4. These books are not “pirated”, they are cheap editions put out by the publishers on condition that they are only made available in certain “third-world” markets. There is nothing illegal about reselling them elsewhere.
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  5.  @edwarddejong8025  You visited there. How wonderful. I lived in Southeast Asia.
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  6.  @edwarddejong8025  I have seen the kinds of tricks publishers pull, from a viewpoint that maybe you have not. I know what “IP” means to them. It means profit, and more profit.
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  7. Gesundheit.
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  8. Remember that C barely existed at the time he started work on this series, and nowadays I don’t think it would be considererd a “high-level” language.
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  9. A lot of publishers make cheaper editions available in what they think of as “third-world” markets, on condition these are not sold in places where they make more profit.
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