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C.S. on the cheap

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134 pointsllambda16 comments

I would buy the "Early History of Smalltalk" book in a heartbeat. If you write software for a living and have not read that Alan Kay essay, take tomorrow and go read it. You won't regret it!

I'm surprised, though, that he missed perhaps the most obvious title along these lines: "Lambda the Ultimate"!

There’s an actual Dover Publications programming book that I really enjoy: "An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus" [1]. So far it’s been enlightening, and even though it’s a 1989 reprint it doesn’t feel all that aged except for some of the semantics used (e.g. ALL_CAPS variable/function names).

The bibliography at the end is also a nice history lesson and very useful if you want to dig deeper into specific topics/paradigms the book touches on.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486478831

I'm working through this book right now and I'd like to give it a +1 as well. I worked through the untyped lambda calculus via Wikipedia a little while back but it was a struggle.

On the other hand this book's crystal clear exposition and exercises are like a breath of fresh air! Reading this first would have saved me a lot of time.

Yes, I have this book too and found it extremely useful and enlightening as well. I wrote a paper on functional programming concepts a few months ago and wrote a bit up front about the lambda calculus, and this book was how I brought myself up to speed. (Sadly, my undergrad CS did not even mention the lambda calculus, as far as I can remember)

I think the "Augment" book (as a collection of essays) might already exist, with an impressive list of writings. Look at "The New Media Reader" http://www.amazon.com/The-Media-Reader-Noah-Wardrip-Fruin/dp...

Includes "The Garden of Forking Paths" (Borges), "As We May Think" (Bush), "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (Turing), "Man-computer Symbiosis" (Licklider), "Augmenting Human Intellect" (Engelbart), "Skecthpad" (Sutherland", and many other gems from truly remarkable people such as Ted Nelson, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Seymour Papert, Tim Berners-Lee (from "technology", I guess), Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari (philosophy), Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Bill Viola (arts), Ben Shneiderman, Sherry Turkle, Lucy Suchman and Terry Winograd (Human-computer Interaction).

PG's On Lisp might be a candidate for reprinting. Judging from not-selling-prices, there seems to be a demand.

Or download it: http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html

Yeah, it is impossible to find it outside US.

btw, this book is about programming methodology (the way of thinking and structuring the code), not about Lisp, the same way HtDP or SICP is not about Scheme.

Peter van der Linden wrote this short side-bar about Alan Kay in one of his "Just Java" books:

"Teach yourself OOP the hard way - Alan Kay, an OO expert [...] began studying the topic in the early 1970s. He was leafing through eighty pages of Simula-67 listing. Simula was the first OO language, but Alan hadn't seen it before and didn't know that. He thought it was Algol or an Algol-variant.

He literally taught himself the principles of OOP from reading eighty pages of code in the first object-oriented language."

For those that don't know, I couldn't help but notice that the cover art for Early History of Smalltalk is a painting by Alex Grey [1] entitled Net of Being [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Grey

[2] http://alexgrey.com/art/paintings/soul/net-of-being

Many of the early Smalltalk books, including the Blue Book which includes a description of Smalltalk written in Smalltalk, and the Green Book with essays on very early Smalltalk history, can be already downloaded from http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html

One thing I've noticed from buying used Smalltalk books is that most of them (apart from the blue/purple/green books) are heavily wedded to defunct implementations. The language is so small it's hard to continue talking about it and not slip into a discussion of the standard library of implementation X.

The best book I've read on OO, by the way, is Andres Valloud's "A Mentoring Course in Smalltalk."

YES! "A Mentoring Course in Smalltalk" is phenomenal! I mean literally it includes a description of implementing perception, you can't get much more phenomenal than that. For real though the part where he discusses conditionals being an indication that you are not demarcating properly at design time was a pivotal moment for me.

I think CS is the accepted abbreviation. This made me think of C.S. Lewis.

A selection of Dijkstra's essays would also be good. "Selected Writings on Computing" has been out of print for a while and pre-dates some of his best essays, but it's in the right direction.

I haven't gotten much joy from these Dover books, but I like the principle.

Agree. I spent some time looking through the archive of his manuscripts at UT (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/) and there's some good stuff in there. http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD303.... is the one that led me there and is a pretty good one. ("On the reliability of programs.")

ACM has published some "History of Programming Languages" books (really conference proceedings) I picked up that are very interesting. Vol 1 was published in 1981 and is on Amazon (http://amzn.com/0127450408) and Vol 2, from 1996, is as well (http://amzn.com/0201895021). There's a Vol 3 but I think it's just in the Digital Library. (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1238844&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE&C...)

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