I prefer to interpret this as "Classic" vs "New"/"Green" content; it depends a lot on the depth of stack for a given subject and how much is in the "old generation" of garbage collection.
Some fields would entirely lack classic books and thus must be viewed with a wider net that includes the precursors. In that case it's obvious that the classic work of the precursors to the new language/field/idea contrast to all of the current works.
In other fields there may have been sufficient refinement to include well regarded works among the classics.
As a brief note: this article is the first time that I've come across the idea and I find it a refreshing proposal for expanding perspective of thought and having a rigorous world view. I do worry that in the rushed modern era there is not enough time afforded to do things the correct way.
It really doesn't have anything to do with old books as such. It's more about reading the actual thing rather than later commentaries and summaries on the thing, if you want to know what the thing said. In the case of, say, CS, it would mean reading On Computable Numbers, With An Application To The Entscheidungsproblem rather than someone else's book/article about what Turing said in his seminal paper.
There are no old books in computer science, because it is a new field, but already the effect that Lewis talks about can be seen...
I think we know what the classics are. If someone's name is in all the textbooks, it's probably worth looking up their original works. Turing and Shannon come immediately to mind as people who are more often read about than read, despite being quite approachable.
Well, I don't know about that. For example, back when I was at university, my graphics professor mentioned that there were hundreds of algorithms for mapping a texture to a sphere going back hundreds of years because map makers had been coming up with them so that they could place maps on globes.
There are old books, but you have to be a bit more creative to find them.
Agreed. If you look at computer science as a branch of mathematics, there are very old books that are as worthwhile as ever (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread), but the kind of computer science that can only be done when you have a computer is still necessarily young because programmable computers are new.
There haven't been as many technical books passed down through the ages, has there? Do they just end up obsolete, or do people just not talk about them and I've been missing out?
would old be something like: implementation is no longer relevant (the software itself is obsoleted), but the idea is seminal -- a basic conceptual building block upon which current systems are implemented? Example: Lambda Papers (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lambda_Papers)
Technological books do not age as well, because technical knowledge is predominantly cumulative.
It's for fields where thoughts are evergreen (basically, anything to do with being human, literature, poetry, philosophy, etc) where this advice matters.
A good modern book on math, or chemistry, or compiler construction has more knowledge than any old one.
A good modern poet is not better than Shakespeare or Homer (and in many eras the poets are way worse than previous eras).
More is not always better, though. E.g a modern book on compere construction will certainly teach more advanced techniques than the Dragon book or Wirth's Compiler Construction books, but I've yet to see any recent book on compiler construction that I'd prefer for the basics.
I'd argue that exactly because so much of it is cumulative, a lot of old technology texts stand up just fine when describing things like algorithms or a sub-field up to a certain level. The original paper on quicksort for example is just fine as an introduction to quicksort.
The books and papers that date are the ones that seek to tell you the best way doing something broad. An old text on the best way to sort in general will be date where descriptions of specific algorithms haven't.
> Technological books do not age as well, because technical knowledge is predominantly cumulative.
Tell that to Claude Shannon, Fred Brooks, and Ken Thompson. "A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits", "The Mythical Man-month" and "On Trusting Trust" have aged fine, I promise.
- aged extremely well in some ways (it still takes 9 months to make a baby no matter how many women are assigned to the project)
- aged poorly in others (disk space is no longer an issue when deciding whether to comment on code)
- remained ahead of its time in others (its a good idea to have an architect to ensure the conceptual integrity of a complex system, rather than to have developers hack it out a bit at a time in a series of scrums)
There are exceptions of course (and those are more about the fundamentals and abstractions than the technology -- e.g. Mythical Man Month is more about people and processes and development approaches than technology).
Thought note that even those are barely ancient, they are at best a century old -- Lewis was talking of Plato as an example and in general centuries old classics, not whether someone should read Zola or Hesse.
Today very few would suggest reading Newton to learn physics in university (e.g. use it as a textbook). At best they'd tell to to read Newton to see how the thinking went behind early discoveries. But people use Plato or Shakespeare or tons of other centuries old writers as their core textbook all the time in philosophy and literature departments.
Well-written technology books age quite well. For example, Hackers[0] has aged so well that the author has gone back over the last 30 years and added multiple appendices to cover what's happened since! The first couple chapters are available[1] on Project Gutenberg as well.
>Well-written technology books age quite well. For example, Hackers[0] has aged so well that the author has gone back over the last 30 years and added multiple appendices to cover what's happened since
The best geometry textbook hasn't changed for more than 2000 years.
Mathematics textbooks are just as likely as anything else to suffer from modern pedagogical theories that have not been tested by time and will come to be regarded as mistakes.
Professors in universities don't consider Euclid's textbook the "best" currently available text in geometry or use it on 101 geometry (except as a historical appreciation/reference).
It's the one with the most historical importance, but it hardly covers modern geometry.
Not only do you learn geometry, but you participate in the same understanding of geometry that all later mathematicians started from.
I've always encouraged reading Euclid, Newton, Einstein. In my humble opinion, mathematics is much easier to understand historically, as it developed, and the best historical perspective comes from primary sources.
I must acknowledge, however, that for whatever reason very few people share my perspective on this.
It is indeed a widely held opinion that most (but not all, of course) original works are not the best sources to learn from. Over time ideas become clearer, better explanations arise, etc. Professional educators and instructors are important, too.
