How to Design Programs 2nd Ed (2024) | Hacker News Reader

How to Design Programs 2nd Ed (2024)

htdp.org

126 pointsAbuAssar23 comments

Since this is actually the same edition that's been available for at least 7 years, but you still clicked the link, it's very likely you're interested in something along those lines. Consider getting "Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming First Edition"[1] by Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi. Although not exactly cutting edge (2004) and Oz-centric[2], still a great read and, for many, a fresh perspective.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concepts,_Techniques,_and_Mode...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oz_(programming_language)

PS: I'll appreciate your recommendations as replies!

How worthwhile is it without being able to run the code examples and do the exercises? Getting Oz working is a real pain at best.

It would be more helpful to me if you said something about why you recommend it.

Like: what’s different from just “the rust programming language” (which is obviously not a beginner text, just trolling).

Incidentally, in my opinion, The Rust Book was laid out exceptionally well for system programming beginners, at least in the state I read it through about 8 years ago or so. Steve and contributors managed to achieve a great balance between thoroughness and approachability of the text while dodging the curse of knowledge in a commendable way.

However, The Rust Book is as far from Concepts as it is from HTDP. It presents a specific language model in its relation to the hardware and common applications one faces while implementing what Concepts and HTDP teach to, well, design.

Thank you, that’s very kind. It was a lot of work!

I agree. I don't recall exactly when I read it, but it was about 8 years ago, too. In that state, the Rust Book was very very good for people like me (i.e., had already learned many PLs).

Wow, version 2 of Mozart is still incomplete, after all these years. I assume it will never happen.

http://mozart2.org/

Working through this was extremely helpful in getting me to think about building things with types, functions, and recursion. I saw an exponential increase in my problem-solving abilities after it. Can't recommend it enough.

How does this compare to Ousterhout's _A Philosophy of Software Design_

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/39996759-a-philosophy...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37975558

Looking over the ToC there seems to be at least some overlap, but at a more basic level and sans the over arching concepts of APoSD.

HTDP teaches how to program. Philosophy does not. That's pretty much the entire difference, they're in different categories of books. Philosophy assumes you know how to program, and attempts to teach a way of programming. HTDP starts from the beginning with no assumptions about the reader's ability to program.

Off topic, but the typesetting here looks top notch and I am curious if anyone can elaborate on the tooling used to render this for the web?

From the Acknowledgements:

> The HTML layout at htdp.org is the work of Matthew Butterick, who created these styles for our on-line documentation.

Some of his other work:

https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/

https://beautifulracket.com/

He's also the person behind Practical Typography [0], a great reference/guide for essential typography and layout concepts and terms. It has opinionated recommendations covering nearly everything you'll need to make beautiful documents like this one.

Particularly helpful is the practical advice: how to get the desired results in Word, Pages, or with HTML/CSS; not just high-level abstract guidelines. There's everything from keyboard shortcuts for inserting different dashes (to accompany the explanation on when to use each type) [1] to guidance on page margins in print and on the web [2].

0: https://practicaltypography.com/

1: https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html

2: https://practicaltypography.com/page-margins.html

https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/

It's like LaTeX, but in Scheme.

Matthew Butterick did the visual redesign of the Web format output.

At one point, I made my embedded API/package docs tool use Scribble.

For example, this document for a package is generated entirely from fragments scattered throughout the code, and package metadata: https://docs.racket-lang.org/roomba/

I am not quite sure what you mean. When I click the link and go to some page of the book, I see the usual interface of racket docs and such. I just see text on a web page. Do you mean the font? Or something else?

Their website says 2014. Amazon says 2018. But definitely not 2024, unless I am missing something.

Direct link is https://htdp.org/2024-11-6/Book/index.html which says "Released on Wednesday, November 6th, 2024 7:36:10pm"

I think this is the 2024 digital release of the 2014/2018 physical publication.

I believe it was edited on the release date given.

Has anyone summarized HTDP into a prompt for something like Claude? Does it improve the quality of code generated?

It's very likely that it has been already scraped by AI bots.

Yes, but also a lot of other things. It's important to direct the LLM to emphasize some embeddings vs others. This makes the chances of you getting good results exponentially higher.

But that would be supervised learning which we don't do (anymore) around here... honestly I wouldn't be surprised if the whole craze circles back to good old supervision, albeit many times empowered by what we have today on the shelves.

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