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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Possibly you mean "too tied to Pascal" ;-)

Was the very first edition of Sedgewick's Algorithms written in Pascal? I heard that but never actually saw that version myself.

Your comment brought back an old memory for me. My first programming language in high school was Turbo Pascal. That IDE was amazing: instant compilation, the blue screen TUI, F1 for inline help, a surprisingly good debugger, and it just felt so smooth and fast back then. No internet needed, no AI assistance, just pure focus and curiosity. Oh, how I really miss those days :)

I think the first several editions (two? three?) were in Pascal, yeah.

The first time I saw TP was on my uncle's Kaypro, which was sort of even more amazing: the screen wasn't capable of blue, the keyboard didn't have an F1 key, and the CPU wasn't capable of instant compilation. But the alternatives were assembly language and Microsoft BASIC!

For assembly, by any chance, do you like the "pink shirt" book? It is one of my all-time favorites! I learned so much from it back in the day. Sadly, I lost my copy somewhere along the way :(

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/peter-norton/

I've never actually read it! I'm not sure what I would recommend if someone asked me for an introductory assembly-language book recommendation. Probably something for ARM or AMD64?

I am not an expert but have been learning RISC-V Assembly in my backlog for some years now. https://riscv-programming.org/

Feels like what x86 could have been if it started clean.

You mean, if the 80386 hadn't been designed with 8086 backwards compatibility in mind? What attributes do you see in common? "x86 started clean" might be a reasonable description of iAPX432, RL78, Itanic, 68000, or ARM2, from different points of view.

I've only written some small and simple RISC-V code; enough to know that I like it a lot better than AMD64 but not as well as ARM32.

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