His review of Black's 'Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition' made me chuckle, and accorded with my own experience of the book.
To the reviewer who said "I was looking forward to a detailed insight into
neural networks in this book. Instead, almost every page is plastered up
with sigma notation", that's like saying about a book on music theory
"Instead, almost every page is plastered with black-and-white ovals (some
with sticks on the edge)." Or to the reviewer who complains this book is
limited to the mathematical side of neural nets, that's like complaining
about a cookbook on beef being limited to the carnivore side.
Thanks for the correction, of course you're right. For some reason I always confuse the two names (this isn't the first time I've written one when I meant the other...). I'd edit my original comment to prevent future confusion but the editing interval appears to have elapsed.
I had the very good fortune of having Peter Norvig as a technical editor of one of my books. Unfortunately there were a lot of problems with my book that needed fixed and I appreciated the precise way he told me what he didn't like. He is certainly one of the best computer scientists on the planet, and also a very nice guy.
My gut feeling is that it has something to do with Arc. Some people
tends to think it's just a regular Lisp with shorter keywords and that
there's nothing really innovative in it. The problem is that pg kept
the code private for too long while advocating publicly the power of
the language and criticizing Common Lisp.
So when he finally released it, some lispers were disappointed because
they've been waiting for something really disruptive. And it
backfired as most of the time, the harshest critics comes from
your disappointed sympathizers.
That being said, I don't hang that much on IRC so I have no real
back-story supporting this.
My theory is that because most of those people are very intelligent yet utterly ineffectual, they act as a kind of support group for one another. They view Lisp as a monastic order where in order to keep the tradition alive, one is forced by the circumstances to give up all his worldly ambitions. PG didn't buy it, and succeeded. So to keep the ideology consistent, you need to introduce the assumption that PG is not a "true" Lisper.
In big systems like amazon's it's not uncommon to fudge something that's not critical. They probably lost data during a migration 8 years ago, or some similar disaster and decided to just rebuild a replica by generating plausible dates.
Definitely some books I will check out after reading this list ("Lisp in small pieces" for example).
Also enjoyed the fact that Norvig is a Talking Heads fan. I always thought of Norvig as a new wave kind of guy.
I feel confident finding so many books I own for my studies are getting rave reviews by Norvig. Then again, we do use a book he wrote with Stuart Russell as well in one of the courses :)
Oh I LOVE that book. A Modern Introduction to AI / 2e right?
The authors have such a relaxed tone and explain things so well AND they cover a huge amount of material.
