
C.S. on the cheap - llambda
http://blog.fogus.me/2013/07/23/c-s-on-the-cheap/
======
jballanc
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"!

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waffle_ss
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](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486478831)

~~~
breckinloggins
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.

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paulojreis
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...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Media-Reader-Noah-Wardrip-
Fruin/dp/0262232278)

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).

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

~~~
MaysonL
Or download it:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html)

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Arjuna
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Grey)

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

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russellallen
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](http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html)

~~~
fusiongyro
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."

~~~
shaunxcode
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.

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

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fusiongyro
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.

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

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jcurbo
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](http://amzn.com/0127450408)) and Vol 2, from
1996, is as well ([http://amzn.com/0201895021](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...](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1238844&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE&CFID=349476680&CFTOKEN=50814356))

