lionize

CS Lewis..look him up

Everyone who dies has probably used a smart phone or the internet so lets start the avalanche!

Harry Potter is a poorly written kids fantasy, how does that relate to programming?

Sad news, however how is this related to Hackery?

There is an argument that it hasn't aged well and that with the advances of programming language design, libraries and hardware it is more of a historical look at the early days of programming. I disagree though as it gives the budding programmer a good foundation. I would also suggest SICP books/lectures. Also learn to program Visual Basic in 5 hours :-p

Paul Graham is no Knuth

I disagree, all languages have the potential to be misused by poor programmers and it's the developer who is the source of the bug, the Linux kernel is written in C and is the most successful/widely used piece of software ever written largely due to the quality of the devs. Blaming a language for bugs or hoping new shiny one will stop a poor programmer for producing bugs is wishful thinking