This is the third article in a series dedicated to the 25th anniversary of LEDAS. Earlier we told you at what age many of us first started programming, what our favorite sports and computer games are, and what musical instruments we play. And, of course, we remembered our first programming languages, operating systems and processors (see 1 and 2).
Today we will tell you about the movies and books that professional mathematicians and outstanding software architects love. But first, let's list a few statements about our developers, and you try to guess which of them are fictitious:
- One of our employees became a prize winner of the national championship in athletics.
- One of us is a silver medalist of an international soccer tournament.
- We have a winner of the National Mathematics Olympiad.
- We also have an employee who has run two half marathons and one 28-kilometer trail, climbed a 5,642-meter mountain, and has progressed to 7a-level rock climbing.
- One of our employees participated in the World Championship.
- One of our developers once traveled for six months dancing the Argentine tango.
- One of us has Niklaus Wirth's signature on his student record book.
- One of our graduate student employees entered graduate school solely to play for her home university team.
- One day, the Prime Minister of the country excused one of our employees from participating in a colloquium on the foreign language.
But let's return to the art of cinema, beloved by many. A survey of colleagues about films they would definitely recommend watching revealed many interesting options. There are not many coincidences in opinions, but they exist:
- Two people recommended paying attention to the films “Attack on Titan”, “Inception”, and “Oppenheimer”.
- The following films were mentioned only once:
“Apocalypse Now”, “Inisherin's Banshee”, “Finding Nemo”, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, “A Man Called Ove”, “Harry Potter”, “Groundhog Day”, “Home”, “The Road” (2009, John Hillcoat), “Dune” (by Denis Villeneuve), “The Sacrifice” (1986), “Star Wars”, “The Game”, “Seven”, “Instructions Not Included”, “Interstellar”, “Cowboy Bebop”, “The Truman Show”, “Barbie”, “The Silence of the Lambs”, “The Gentlemen”, “The Invisible Guest”, “There Will Be Blood”, “Something”, “The Good”, “The Bad and the Ugly”, “Pulp Fiction”, “Snatch”, “The Wolf of Wall Street”, “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”, “The Darjeeling Train”, “The Prince of Egypt”, “ Dororo”, “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure”, “Guardians of the Galaxy”, “Taxi Driver”, “Oculus” (2013), “Get Out” (2017), “Mononoke” (TV series, 2007), “Coraline” (2009), “Forrest Gump”, “Watchmen” (by Snyder), “Jaws”, “Alien”, “Children of Men” (2006), “Hara-Kiri”: Death of a Samurai (2011), “Her” (2013), “In Brugge”, “Drive”, “Hot Fuzz”, “Knives Out”, “Love actually” (2003), “Memento” (2000), “Office Space” (1999), Wes Anderson's short films “The Curious Case of Henry Sugar”, “The Swan”, “The Pied Piper”, “Poison”. - There were also opinions that the following categories were worth watching: all Tarantino films, all Nolan films, all Louis De Funes films, and all Dustin Hoffman films.
The situation is similar with favorite books (by the way, we recently shared a list of 42 books that were discussed in our Book Club):
- The following books were recommended to be read:
“The Alchemist”, “The Running Man” (by Stephen King), “Infinite Jest” (by D.F. Wallace), “Demons” (by Dostoyevsky), “The Brothers Karamazov”, “Dandelion Wine” (by Ray Bradbury), “The Magus” (by John Fowles), “The Gate” (by Poul Anderson), “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”, “A Hero of Our Time”, Jane Eyre”, “The Three-Body Problem”, “The Call of the Wild”, “The Little Prince”, Neuromancer”, “Idoru”, “The Difference Machine”, “Stranger in a Strange Land”, “The Dictator”, “Woman in the Dunes”, “Nova”, “The Burnt Map”, “Babylon 17”, “An Ordinary Story”, “Alone in Berlin (Everyone Dies Alone)”, “A Song of Ice and Fire”, “Pollyanna”, “The Good Soldier Švejk” (by Jaroslav Hašek), “The Old Man and the Sea” (by Ernest Hemingway), “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” (by Douglas Adams), “Rules for Survival in Jakarta”, “The Witcher Saga” (by Sapkowski), “The Vorkosigan Saga”, “The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle” (by Stuart Turton), “Heart of a Dog”, “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, “I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream”, “I, Robot”, “Good Will Hunting”, “The Metamorphosis of Prime Intelligence”, “Ulysses”. - It was also suggested that almost all books by the following authors are worth reading: Jack London, Agatha Christie, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leigh Bardugo, Anton Chekhov, Andrzej Sapkowski, and Robert Sheckley.
Interestingly, it turned out to be much easier to recommend fiction than technical literature. In any case, there were far fewer answers to the question about books useful for work:
- Four people voted for “Clean Code” (by Robert Martin).
- Two people recommended “Code Complete” (by Steve McConnell).
- The following books were mentioned once:
“Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams” (by DeMarco, Lister), “Object-Oriented Design Techniques” (E. Gamma, R. Helm, R. Johnson, D. Vlissides), “The Pragmatic Programmer” (by Andrew Hunt), “The C++ Programming Language”, 4th ed. (by Bjarne Stroustrup), “C++ Templates” (by Vanderwood et al.), “C++ 20: Get the Details” and "Concurrency with Modern C++)” (by R. Grimm), “Hands-On Design Patterns with C++” (by F. Pikus), “Effective Modern C++” and “More Effective C++” (by S. Meyers), “Functional Programming in C++” (by Ivan Cukic), “The NURBS Book” (by Les A. Piegl).
To conclude this series of articles, we give a little statistic of the anniversary year:
- There are now more than 110 of us;
- The average age of our employee is 33 years;
- 40% of employees were born after the founding of LEDAS;
- The number of children (under 18 years old) in the families of our employees is only three times less than the number of employees themselves.
If you've read this far, it's time to find out which statements about our employees listed at the very beginning of the article were fictitious. We compiled this list on the eve of the company's birthday, which coincides with April Fool's Day (April 1), so we admit that the question was a joke. The point of this joke is that we decided not to think anything up: all the statements are true. There is no doubt that our employees are outstanding, bright and original in every sense and dimension!