Andrew S. Tanenbaum's FAQ

I met Prof. Tanenbaum in 2008, when I pitched AWS (Amazon Web Services) to the university staff. (I was Tech Evangelist for AWS in EMEA at the time).<p>I only knew about him because of his &quot;fights&quot; with Linus Torvalds, and because I&#x27;ve studied on a couple of his books (which I found excellent).<p>Meeting him was a big surprise: extremely funny, friendly, provocative, very smart, and in general someone you could instantly like. I loved when he would think about something and just close one eye, raise the other one to the ceiling, and make one of the funniest faces ever.<p>I felt so happy afterwards, for the honor of meeting him, and for the joy that derived from that attitude of his.<p>I wish every professor was as enjoyable (and competent) as him.

I strongly recommend reading all of his books. They are very clear and non boring and the knowledge you get from understanding them is really the basics of what any programer should know I believe (well except maybe for the distributed systems book).<p>After reading this faq, I&#x27;m very curious about the travel book.

&gt; Will somebody please explain to me why &#x27;ezel&#x27; (donkey) is masculine, &#x27;paard&#x27; (horse) is neuter and &#x27;antilope&#x27; (antelope) is feminine?<p>Don&#x27;t worry, Dutch people don&#x27;t know this either. Unfortunately that means for each word you&#x27;ll have to learn whether it&#x27;s a &quot;de&quot; or a &quot;het&quot; word. Something that slowly happens over time as your vocabulary expands. This is one of the main reasons why Dutch has a reputation of being difficult to master.

&gt; It was so strange to be in an environment with people having I.Q.&#x27;s below 150 and where it wasn&#x27;t necessary to study 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week just to keep up.<p>Is this true? Seems crazy, how do you stand doing this for ~5 years?

&gt; I spent a lot of time working for the Sierra Club and lobbying in Sacramento for a bill to protect San Francisco Bay from developers.<p>I imagine he meant a different kind of developers than those who are taking (or have taken) over the area.

I have listened to as many of his lectures as I can find, and I am very interested in the work he is doing on Minix 3. 10k lines of code in the kernel makes for an easily approachable learning environment in my opinion.

Q: What inspired you to produce a personal FAQ?<p>A: See Computer Networks, 3rd edition, page 663.<p>Did you just tell me to go fuck myself?<p>I believe I did, Bob. I believe I did.

Mr. Tanenbaum has retired from the Vrije Universiteit recently, see here: <a href="http://www.few.vu.nl/~ast/afscheid" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.few.vu.nl&#x2F;~ast&#x2F;afscheid</a>