True story →
I’m sure most people here are too young to remember Jerry Pournelle. He was a science fiction author who wrote a column for Byte magazine for many years about his tinkering with computers. In my opinion, they started out as reasonable accounts of exploration by a hobbyist. But over the years they somehow morphed into an almost-knows-nothing guy annoyingly pretending to be an expert (boring accounts of tortuous feats of kludgery to avoid new-fangled tech).
Anyway, after the publication of SICP, there was a corkboard outside Sussman & Abelson’s offices covered with reviews of the book. In a place of honor, dead center with some space around it, was Pournelle’s review which stated “I didn’t understand a word of it.”
