HN Explorer

77 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 12.1 ms ] thread
srean
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

so-cal-schemer
With continuation(s) in this follow up:

The Seasoned Schemer

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262561006/the-seasoned-schemer/

alfiedotwtf
And then The Reasoned Schema.. that one will blow your mind and wonder why sadly PROLOG didn’t take off
so-cal-schemer
Not to forget The Little Prover, The Little Typer, and The Little Learner.

One happy Little family.

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL21569615W/Little_Prover

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20186830W/The_Little_Typer

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL28874136W/Little_Learner

And Grandpa, The Little LISPer

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2938932W/The_little_LISPer

and cousins, The Little MLer

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2729083W/The_little_MLer

and A Little Java, a Few Patterns

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2729082W/A_little_Java_a_few...

bigfishrunning
After reading the little schemer, I bought two more copies just to lend out to people. It's that good.
JKCalhoun
“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.”

jdw64
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.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
so-cal-schemer
My impression was the opinions on SDF aren't divided so much as most of the scant reviewers were unprepared to grok this book. As much as people like to cite SICP, "Advanced SICP" flew totally under the radar.
jdw64
That could be the case! I found it a great help when working on programs that interface with PLCs.
Flow
My favorite two computer books are “Starting Forth” and “Let over Lambda”. It’s something about the language and the approach I like.
so-cal-schemer
The intersection of these (illustrated-style ∩ Lisp) might be

Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time!

by Conrad Barski

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16807102W/Land_of_Lisp

Though, I've seen some comments that some of the code isn't idiomatic or something; probably not a great book to learn Lisp from.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6905041-land-of-lisp

-- Not an easy book to get ahold of these days (like most of these)

so-cal-schemer
Maybe not so hard to find! (worth a look and check out the music video):

http://landoflisp.com/

comment from pg: "Turns out the border between genius and insanity is a pretty cheery place"

so-cal-schemer
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

s_hegde
I second the recommendation for The Nature of Computation; very well written with interesting problems.
pluc
Who reads programming books anymore? People don't even read code
adamddev1
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 no 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
> 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.

pitchlatte
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
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__
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.)

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
kragen
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 LLMs can use as well as humans. Better, maybe.

so-cal-schemer
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
Totally.

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

pan69
> 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

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

This one is really good.

so-cal-schemer
Excellent. I was just looking for the title for Abrash's graphics book.

Another from the same publisher is

Assembly Language Magic: Programming for the 8088-80386 by William H. Murray

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2192212M/Assembly_language_m...

I really enjoyed my intro to RISC assembly:

SPARC Architecture, Assembly Language Programming, and C by Richard P. Paul

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL9285324M/SPARC_Architecture_...

Any recommendations for VAX or 68k or 6502 assembly (or ARM)?

so-cal-schemer
This looks like a fun book (that my library so far won't order.. published 2024):

Classic Game Programming on the NES: Make your own retro video game

by Tony Cruise

https://www.manning.com/books/classic-game-programming-on-th...

Do you have an amazing idea for a NES game you’ve been itching to turn into reality? Classic Game Programming on the NES will show you how. This all-practical beginner's guide is full of step-by-step guidance on everything from graphics and music, to enemy AI, to the 6502 Assembler language you need to get the most out of the NES.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1633438015

pan69
Oh, those are good choices. Some other recommendations that you might be interested in:

See MIPS Run: Second Edition by Dominic Sweetman

ARM System-on-Chip Architecture by Steve Furber

I love both of these books.

rramadass
The Sweetman book on MIPS is one of the best to learn OS internals from and how exactly it interfaces to the hardware.

Complementing that is the excellent Unix Systems for Modern Architectures: Symmetric Multiprocessing and Caching for Kernel Programmers by Curt Schimmel.

Complementing the Furber book is the excellent Computer System Design: System-on-Chip by Michael Flynn and Wayne Luk.

And of course the classic ARM System Developer's Guide: Designing and Optimizing System Software by Andrew Sloss et al. is also a must read.

alfiedotwtf
The Abrash books are these days just for nostalgia, and wouldn’t recommend them to a junior dev wanting to level up (except the chapter on using timers).. instead I’d recommend:

- Latency by Pekka Enberg

- Rust Atomics and Locks by Mara Bos

- Code Optimisation by Kris Kaspersky

agumonkey
abrash black book reads like a thriller
jrmg
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.

rbanffy
If, for nothing else, Programmers At Work has Bill Gates talking about dumpster diving for program listings.

The book is great - I love how Gary (IIRC) describes the centrality of data structures and how code kind of emerges from there.

so-cal-schemer
Classic!

The 2nd part reminds me of another classic in my library:

Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs

by Wirth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithms_%2B_Data_Structures...

jan_m_savage
How did Wirth's book benefit you?

Wirth writes fast but well.

so-cal-schemer
It was probably the first book on data structures and algorithms I came to possess (likely from a library book sale as a teen), so I would say I learned a lot from it, but don't remember the particulars. I remember it being clear and to the point with good diagrams and printing, even though I didn't use Pascal -- I read it as pseudocode.

And a memorable title.

Also it was a very compact hardcover edition that I could carry around easily.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
rbanffy
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.

milofeynman
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.

bitfhacker
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
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.

so-cal-schemer
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...

lanthissa
functional programming in scala was probably the biggest level up of my career from a book
so-cal-schemer
A dream of mine is to study some Scala at EPFL.

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

jbmchuck
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.
adityaathalye
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
May I add:

Uncle Bob's Clean Code and

Denis Ritchie's C programming language

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