Spine of my Clojure book

I am happy how the spine of my Clojure book turned out to be. I feel functional programming is a great invention by humanity, and it should be compared with other great ones, so we decided to put the great inventions of humanity in the spine.

Starting at the bottom is stone tool that man created, which gave him some form of defense against animals, then comes fire which helped man ward off animals, cook, made his digestive system less demanding, thus making evolution create humans with more brain power.

With the help of fire man was able to extract metal, combine with other materials and make tools. That comes as the third icon. With tools, crafts flourished and one of the greatest invention the wheel was born which made man transport materials and himself efficiently.

With greater ability to transport, comes greater ability to spread knowledge, and greater ability to do commerce, so one had to keep track of records, thus writing came about to be. The fifth icon from the bottom shows a clay tablet found in Mesopotamia where one has worked out the square root of 2, this icon also symbolizes invention of Mathematics.

The sixth icon symbolizes the invention of zero, this helped us to accelerate mathematics. The seventh is the invention of electronics and microprocessor, without which you will not be reading this blog right now.

As ways of communication sped up, man’s desire to spread knowledge grew. We had the movement like GNU which is the 8th icon. I see liberation of software from the shackles of proprietary software makers as one of the greatest milestones of humanity. I feel one must compare it with zero. This movement came about and liberated humanity when the capitalist were shackling us and putting restrictions on sharing code.

The 9th icon is the invention of GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux also symbolizes how much humanity could progress if a person who loves humanity shares his work. Almost entirely the world runs on GNU/Linux today.

The 10th icon is very very very important. Though people could share code, humanity was tricked into believing sharing of knowledge is illegal and must be controlled. The pirate party, the idea that one must be able to share the information he or she has freely is great one. Because of this idea, 1000s around the world who couldn’t afford high-priced information, could access it and prosper.

Due to this acceleration of information flow we are going to conquer galaxies and much beyond, that’s what the 11th icon signifies, the magical future, to achieve it I think functional programming will play a major role.