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Favourites

• Of course I like nearly all books written by my favourite athours.


• One particularly hilarious book which I like a lot is:
  

  Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There exists even a full-fledged web-page on the h2g2.



• Some other great books, in the category of "vulgarizing scientific literature", are:
  

  	Douglas R. Hofstadter's - Goedel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid - Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern - The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, together with Daniel C. Dennett
  	Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh, a nice overview of the history of mathematics and how it eventually lead to the proof of Fermat's postulate by the mathematician Andres Wiles. A must for readers with a healthy interest in mathematics.
  	Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick provides a good intuitive introduction to mathematical chaos theory and its applications.

Some of my most favourite authors are

	William Gibson (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, All Tomorrow's Parties, Idoru, Virtual Light, Pattern Recognition, ...). With Neuromancer, William Gibson introduced the world to cyberspace, with his debut Neuromancer, and science fiction has never been the same since.
	Frank Herbert's award-winning Dune epic captured the imaginations of millions of readers worldwide — and transformed their perception of what the future could be. By his death in 1986, Frank Herbert had completed six novels in the Dune series. After his death, working from files left by his father, Brian Herbert and bestselling novelist Kevin J. Anderson collaborated on a new set of Dune novels, prequels to the classic Dune novels.
	Amélie Nothomb (Hygiène de l'assassin, Stupeur et tremblements, Métaphysique des tubes, ...)

Beyond any doubt, my favourite architects are:

	Antonio Gaudi
	Victor Horta
	Hundertwasser

And here is a selection of some of my favourite cities :

Gent	Lisboa	Paris
Barcelona	London	Venice
Amsterdam	Moscow	San Francisco
Buenos Aires	New Orleans	Vancouver

Here are some of my favourite artists (in alphabetical order):

	Salvador Dali
	Paul Delvaux
	Mauritius Cornelius Escher
	H.R. Giger
	René Magritte

• My favourite programming languages are Scheme (a Lisp-like functional language), Prolog (the well-known logic programming language) and Smalltalk (a clean object-oriented programming language). Although these are all representatives of a different programming paradigm, they do have several things in common: they have all have been around for several decennia, they have an extremely simple syntax and a clean and concise semantics and they are all dynamically typed.


• Web site of the Belgian Association for Dynamic Languages. (Check out their icon...)


• The proceedings of the historic 1968 and 1969 NATO software engineering conferences online.