Anyone who enjoyed reading that (especially the bit about mathematical reality) absolutely must read Anathem by Neal Stephenson. The proof is rather enumerative, which I will leave as an exercise ;)
As for discussion. Is not the quote "We live
either by rule of thumb or on other people’s professional
knowledge." the most antithetical to hacker culture you've ever heard?!?
If referring to this sentence: "Examples are the programming languages Clojure, which is a contemporary dialect of Lisp, Rebol and Refal." Perhaps it's just poorly worded, but the intention seems to be to list each of those languages as being homoiconic, with an aside that Clojure is a modern Lisp. Maybe some parenthesis are in order, heh ;)
Curious where "Optimize for less state, less coupling, less complexity and less code...in that order." came from. Would like to read more from that source.
As for discussion. Is not the quote "We live either by rule of thumb or on other people’s professional knowledge." the most antithetical to hacker culture you've ever heard?!?