Are you thinking of Donald Knuth? rms replies to email.

Last one was probably Let Over Lambda. One of the few programming books I've read cover to cover.

Either that or he had just recently learnt about parrots and felt strongly enough to put it in.

I have the same problem. My hearing is also excellent. I have worked out what the problem is, though. The truth is, nobody can hear everything in a place like that. But other people can fill in gaps in speech, possibly from other signals like watching the face, but I think mainly from a conversation model in their brain. For some reason I either lack the model, or it's just not trained properly (more likely tbh), so I have to hear everything to understand.

"If you included all of the things needed to document a project in source, your code would be unreadable."

Donald Knuth would disagree.