Reading a book of lectures by Donald Knuth that I let myself be tempted by in my last spin through Borders. (Note to self: when picking up a book you’ve reserved, it’s completely possible to JUST go to the checkout line and buy that book, and only that book.) Donald Knuth is most famous for writing a set of algorithm books. His lecture set is from a set of lectures he gave at MIT on “Interactions Between Faith and Computer Science”.  The book’s entitled ‘Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About’.
Observant readers of this blog will see a category for Christianity among my archives. It’s not something I’ve written about much of late, for a variety of reasons. But you’ll occasionally see in this blog that says something about Christianity and what I’m thinking about at the time.

Anyway, as I’m skimming his first lecture, I’m also taking a quick peek at Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Thinking about Knuth made me think about the made-up language he used for his algorithm examples which made me think about what new languages are out there that I haven’t heard about of late. An article about build systems (The Buzz About Builds) is on the cover of this month’s magazine, and since I’ve been wrestling with an automated build system at work, I take a quick look-see.

Now I’ll caveat that I’m not all that impressed with this article. I’m three sections in and it hasn’t told me anything of great technical value. A little bit of business background as to why build systems are now getting greater focus in the industry’s great, but isn’t going to help me wrestle with CruiseControl tomorrow. What I do find interesting is a quote that’s at the top of section three, ostensibly about distributed development teams and thus the need for better build systems, is this quote:

We Bokonists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. —Kurt Vonnegut

Note that I think it’s a lousy quote for distributed development teams. I don’t ever want to be on a team where I can’t “discover[…] what [I’m] doing”. But a very interesting convergence of reading materials. I’ll caveat that I haven’t read the source of Mr. Vonnegut’s quote: couldn’t tell you its context, applicability, etc.  But it does pop out to me tonight and intrigue me to find out more.  (Will admit to you that I would believe that we could often do God’s will without being aware of it.)
Update: a quick spin around the ‘Net points me to Bokonists being in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and various serious-minded writers speak on its satire of religion. Now on my list of soon-to-reads…