Literature in programming and computer science

Posted by Peter Turner on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Peter Turner
Published on 2011-01-12T19:34:16Z Indexed on 2011/01/12 19:58 UTC
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history

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jargon

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literature

I hope, gentle programmers, that you'll forgive me for not asking a "Soft Question" on theoreticalCS.SE and asking this here.

It has recently come to my attention that bigendian came from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. I was pretty surprised when listening to the book on my commute to hear something I'd only heard before in Comp Sci / Engineering classes. I thought it was some sort of nouveau-politically incorrect piece of holdover jargon like Master and Slave drives or Polish Notation.

Are there any other incidents, not of politically incorrect jargon, but of literature influencing aspects of computers, programming or software development?

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