Book - Cryptonomicon

I read Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. I had high hopes after reading Snow Crash and Seveneves. Cryptonomicon certainly had some interesting parts and great scenes, but it also had some seriously underdeveloped characters and clichés which annoyed me.However, it had an appendix about a card-based the encryption scheme which was used as a plot device, and is actually a real encryption scheme called Solitare.The algorithm is surprisingly easy to do with a deck of cards especially after some practice. However it’s very repetitive. There’s a reason we use computers to do cryptography! I implemented the scheme in the Gleam programming language as an exercise.