Oct 17 2008
Rapture of the Nerds
Just finished this delightful little book, Rapture for the Geeks, by Dooling (see MacLeod’s Fall Revolution series for the origin of the expression of his title). A fun little book, and a bit different from what I was expecting. It is about the singularity, of course, but it also channels parts of the Jargon file / Hacker’s Dictionary, Raymond’s Art of Unix Programming and other works of Unix and Open Source advocacy, with a dash of the Science v. Religion discourse of the likes of Dennett, Hitchins and Dawkins.
I quite enjoyed the book, though there is nothing really new here in terms of an original contribution to the topics by Dooling. Those unfamiliar with the concept of the technological singularity, though, will find a lot of good references and ideas to follow up from here. Dooling collects quotes and excepts from all of the great original thinkers, from Turing through Kurzweil. I was right with him till probably the last chapter where, to my mind, he looses the courage of his convictions on the value of religion regarding its moral and philosophical contributions. He seems early on to be right with the scientists when talking about minds, brains and the “soul”. So found his wishy-washiness in the end a bit perplexing.
But as I said there is a lot of fun to be had. I haven’t mentioned my admiration of the poetry of Emily Dickenson yet in this blog. For some reason, she appears to appeal enormously to those of the geeky mindset, especially her poem about the Mind/Brain. Dooling presents a Python program version of Emily’s famous poem (again not his work, but that of Martelli and Ravenscroft of the Python Cookbook fame, and Google and, BTW, who are working with Guido, the inventor of Python, at Google on the Python language and other projects). It is an example of the pure poetry of programming in general, and the Python programming language in particular.