rbanffy 11 hours ago

For me, the blue Smalltalk book by Adele Goldberg was deeply formative. It was computing done right and from first principles.

The other two formative experiences for me were using Cincom’s Mantis on the 3278 and Dataflex 2. Both made it obvious how quickly one could go from screen to persisted data, CRUD, application logic, and reporting with the right level of abstraction. Much later I described Dataflex as “Rails for the VT100”. Sadly, Cincom will not provide a hobby license to run it on an emulated 4381, and won’t even give away free manuals, and the company behind Dataflex (I don’t remember their name right now) seems to not even have any versions from that time. When I read Paul Graham’s Beating the Averages, it all clicked perfectly.

so-cal-schemer 13 hours ago

How about Higher-Order Perl by Mark Jason Dominus?

https://hop.perl.plover.com/

Some other great low flying titles:

The Computational Beauty of Nature by Gary William Flake

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262561273/the-computational-bea...

The Nature of Computation by Cristopher Moore and Stephan Mertens.

https://nature-of-computation.org/

Algorithms by S. Dasgupta, C.H. Papadimitriou, and U.V. Vazirani

https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~dasgupta/book/index.html

and On Lisp, of course:

https://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

  • a-tk 13 hours ago

    I would also recommend Higher Order Perl. I went through it this summer after a recommendation. I don't know Perl, and found it was more focused on practical functional programming techniques, and provides creative and interesting justification for its topics, which can be rewritten in other languages too. Great book.

  • s_hegde 6 hours ago

    I second the recommendation for The Nature of Computation; very well written with interesting problems.

jrmg 12 hours ago

Programmers at work: I bought a used copy of it - probably after reading this the first time it was posted. Great book, if you can find it.

Code, by Charles Petzold should be on any programmer’s list - and the list of anyone with curiosity about how the modern world works. It somehow manages the amazing trick of being readable for the novice, but also containing nuggets of insight for the expert all at the same time. Such a well written book.

pan69 13 hours ago

> The majority of the book was about detailed optimization for the 8088 and 8086, yet it was published when the 80486 was showing up in high-end desktop PCs.

The book goes all the way up to discussing the 386. It's just that the foundations is rooted in 8086, which is a large chunk of the book.

My favorite books (or the ones I have spend most time with) and that have been most formative for me are:

Mastering Turbo Assembler by Tom Swan

Zen of Graphics Programming by Michael Abrash

The Zen Of Assembly Language by Michael Abrash

Programmer's Guide to the EGA, VGA, and Super VGA Cards by Richard F. Ferraro

The Indispensable PC Hardware Book by Hans-Peter Messmer

ludicrousdispla 1 hour ago

Who can forget Carlton Egremont III's Mr. Bunny's Big Cup o' Java ?

adityaathalye 4 hours ago

dadgum! It's been a while...

> but I'd like to highlight some of the more esoteric books which affected my thinking

In the same vein, James Hagues's whole blog is wonderful; well-informed, witty, funny, incisive, insightful, with personality... I learned much from avidly reading it, while he was actively publishing. Thanks, James!

Also, I am cracking up at the construction of the site subtitle... It's not just tongue-in-cheek. It's also funny and with the times. :p :)

cagz 1 hour ago

May I add:

Uncle Bob's Clean Code and

Denis Ritchie's C programming language

JKCalhoun 14 hours ago

“This is also one of the most bizarrely delayed technical book releases I can recall. The majority of the book was about detailed optimization for the 8088 and 8086…”

I’m starting work on the (tentatively titled) “The Second Book of KIM.”

bitfhacker 10 hours ago

The book that made me see programming differently and the one that taught me the most was The C Programming Language, by Dennis Ritchie.

  • so-cal-schemer 9 hours ago

    AKA K&R for Brian Kernighan & dmr.

    Another regret was not getting my copy signed at a certain USENIX ATC.

    ..tho, actually Dennis was there with Ken and Rob, not Brian.

srean 15 hours ago

Rarely have I felt the urge to fly out of my building and grab any random guy on the street and exclaim can you see how cool this is, can you please.

That happened to me when I read The Little Schemer.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262560993/the-little-schemer/

(The other time was when I saw a Hasui)

https://ukiyo-e.org/artist/kawase-hasui

Flow 14 hours ago

My favorite two computer books are “Starting Forth” and “Let over Lambda”. It’s something about the language and the approach I like.

lanthissa 9 hours ago

functional programming in scala was probably the biggest level up of my career from a book

  • so-cal-schemer 8 hours ago

    A dream of mine is to study some Scala at EPFL.

    Likewise, (take/TA?) HtDP at UBC.

rramadass 1 hour ago

There are a lot of classics which can be listed here, but the following two w.r.t. systems software come to mind;

1) Systems Programming by John Donovan. A classic from the 1970s, one of the first to really lay out the software interface to hardware in practical terms.

2) System Software: An Introduction to Systems Programming by Leland Beck. This is sort of a successor to the above but from the 1980s/1990s.

There are too few books on this subject and with the rise of Hypervisors/VMs, Managed Languages, Containers, Emulators etc. we need a practical survey book on this entire domain.

pluc 13 hours ago

Who reads programming books anymore? People don't even read code

  • adamddev1 12 hours ago

    The people who build all the solid, crucial parts of the infrastructure and tools that the vibe coders depend on. People who are pushing forward with new ideas. People who are building solid, snappy, delightful software. People who take joy in understanding the logic and creating solid, novel abstractions.

    It is such a big category error to say "we're building simple apps without looking at code, therefore no one reads code anymore."

    I'm not sure if this comment is meant as a little joke or observation, but I keep on seeing serious comments like this. It is serious anti-intellectualism to scoff at people reading programming books or understanding things.

    • perrygeo 11 hours ago

      > People who are pushing forward with no ideas.

      s/no/new ideas?

      The people pushing forward with no ideas are likely not reading much either.

      • so-cal-schemer 11 hours ago

        Perhaps he was thinking of vibe coders.

        s/ideas/understanding/

        a glitch in the dialogue

      • adamddev1 11 hours ago

        That was a typo - I meant new ideas

        • perrygeo 11 hours ago

          Got it. Yeah, everything we'd consider "new ideas" demands, at the very minimum, a strident curiosity about how things currently work. Those people tend to read. A lot.

    • pitchlatte 9 hours ago

      well written. i also feel that the generation of code becoming possible/simple means that our theoretical fundamentals ought to become that much more secure.

  • so-cal-schemer 10 hours ago

    I still think the return-on-time from a good book is greater than a lecture or video or discussion. There is just so much refinement and information density, plus the ability to skip around to find interesting content is hard to match. (there is also something to be said for reinforcement of memory via spatial awareness while reading a physical book that is lost on a screen).

    An interactive portal to a digital book could rival or surpass the experience, but I haven't encountered that yet.

    • __mharrison__ 9 hours ago

      Great points.

      Once if the great things about books is that the author was required to plan out a path to take you along. Most shorter content skips that.

      Also love physical books and the spatial reinforcement.

      (I'm probably biased as a book author because books sales are definitely in a slump.)

  • kragen 8 hours ago

    Over the last few weeks, I've been eliciting a compiler for an experimental programming language called 5emel from Claude Opus 5.5. To give you the flavor, here's a randomly selected function from its compiler:

        # The table of the program's own functions, by their descriptors, which
    # the runtime searches for --memo-every and --memo-all.
    def function_data(:defs) =
      :rows = loop :next(:r = defs, :acc = []) (
        | [] = r; acc
        | [Def { :fname, _, _, _ }, ...:more] = r;
          next(more, [acc, "  .quad d_", fname, "\n"])
      );
      ["  .balign 8\n  .globl rt_functions, rt_nfunctions\n",
       "rt_nfunctions: .quad ", show(length(defs)), "\n",
       "rt_functions:\n", rows]

    There's a lot of code in 5emel I haven't read; there's something like 15000 lines of TypeScript and JavaScript and 3000 lines of C. I've read almost none of any of that. I haven't even read all of the compiler, which is only about 1600 lines of code.

    Despite that, I think I've been putting my extensive past reading of programming books to pretty good use in this process. 5emel is directed at finding a workable, though not optimal, general solution to one of the famously most difficult problems in computer science, and if it is successful, I think it'll be a real advance — and one that LLM coders can use as well as human coders. Better, maybe.

    Maybe, six months from now, AIs will be good enough to devise better programming languages on their own so they can program things more easily. They don't seem to be able to do that right now, though, so my skillset doesn't seem completely obsolete yet.

    However, I play go recreationally, even though AlphaGo already plays go better than any human ever could, and possibly better than any human ever will. Often go players consult KataGo or a similar AI to improve their game. So I anticipate that, even if my programming skillset is completely surpassed by AIs, I'll probably still enjoy doing things like 5emel (if I have the chance), just like I enjoy playing Minetest and walking around my neighborhood at sunset.

    By the way, there's probably enough information in the above snippet to recreate all of the important parts of 5emel. I fed it to an Incognito Claude session and asked it to explain it, and it explained basically all of the significant aspects of the language, although it wasn't sure about some of them. You could probably elicit the rest of the compiler and runtime system from it, although you'll probably have to fight your way through a lot of the same problems I have.

    • so-cal-schemer 4 hours ago

      I confess this is above my pay grade, but very intersting and I would like to probe the machine with this data.

      I enjoy your choice of phrase: 'to elicit' code from Claude. Like wishes from the Djinn. I imagine a guiding light through the Library of Babel ..or a trail of bread crumbs.

      Over several months I watched over a friend's shoulder, with heavy lifting from Cluade, as he designed and verified a PCB for an IoT SoC with custom drivers for components, even hacking a video encoder to be a partial GPU such that it can playably run Quake (and more planned). And another friend designing a RISC-V core in an FPGA with aid from AI. I feel like quoting Roy Batty in Bladerunner.

      Anyway.. mate?

      • kragen 3 hours ago

        Totally.

        I'm going to try to write 5emel up properly this weekend.

so-cal-schemer 10 hours ago

Has anyone read or can comment on this one?:

Functional Design and Architecture: Examples in Haskell

by Alexander Granin

https://www.manning.com/books/functional-design-and-architec...

jdw64 14 hours ago

Software Design for Flexibility (2021) This book left the deepest impression on me. I was fascinated by the concept of additive programming. Personally, I spent a good while thinking about and studying the idea of "evolvability." True, the overuse of flexibility can obscure control flow, and opinions on the book are divided but I learned many concepts from it. Since I often work on maintaining and modifying legacy code, this book was a great help.

jbmchuck 7 hours ago

I'm a huge fan of Kernighan and Pike's 'The Practice of Programming'. An incredibly clearly written book that manages to show how to write great code without falling into any cargo cult acronym nonsense.

  • so-cal-schemer 6 hours ago

    ^ another book I enjoyed very much. Underrated.

milofeynman 11 hours ago

The only technical book I own is Designing Data-Intensive Applications and I think everyone should read the first part of it.

I prefer learning as I go and have never enjoyed technical books, but I think everything is basically a database and understanding those fundamentals is very helpful.

riskd 12 hours ago

The only