Comment by adityaathalye
16 days ago
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
https://aplwiki.com/wiki/John_Scholes%27_Conway%27s_Game_of_...
I'm not sure how you don't call that an eso lang.
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