Comment by bryanrasmussen
12 days ago
I always found the first half of the book a light read, an exciting read, it was as wonderful to read for me as Lord Dunsany, I sped through it.
When it started to get to object orientation I started having problems following. It just didn't make sense. Maybe I should try again, but it just always made me feel that for my particular mind functional thinking was better.
From personal experience, I can say a person can build a fruitful bread-and-butter earning programming career on the first two chapters of the book, provided you solve literally all the exercises. Such is the density of know-how and design context packed in there. This also makes the book a challenging read. I feel like the math-y content is also not for everyone. After all, it was aimed at MIT engineering undergrad students who are expected to have a baseline mathematical felicity well above the average high school level.
I find the difficulty of the chapters goes as the square of their number. Viz. Chapter 5 is 25 times as hard as chapter 1. I also find that basically no one goes past chapter 4. I've only ever seen one good talk on it and the guy was so far down the esolang rabbit hole that he had an IBM apl keyboard.
Not sure I'd call APL an esolang - it's just an old language focused on array manipulation like you'd find in numpy
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Hm... I read half of the book (with exercises) and stopped. I don't remember why, but it was probably OO for me too.