21 APR 2011 by ideonexus

 Peter Norvig: From Books to Paragraphs

You look at Knuth's original Literate Programming, and he's really trying to say, "What's the best order for writing a book," assuming that someone's going to read the whole book and he wants it to be in a logical order. People don't do that anymore. They don't want to read a book, they want an index so they can say, "What's die least amount of this book that I have to read? I just want to find the three paragraphs that I need. Show me that and then I'll move on." I think that's a real change.
Folksonomies: new media programming media
Folksonomies: new media programming media
  1  notes

People don't want books anymore, they want direct answers to their questions found in an index.