... and The Unix Programming Environment also by Kernighan and Pike
1,025 karma · joined July 15, 2009
Other memoirs by people who worked in computing and became disillusioned or dissatisfied with it:
Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976)
Cliff Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil (1995)
Neither is all memoir like Ullman's book -- both are mostly exposition and argument. But both have some passages of memoir, and in both the author's personality shows through clearly throughout.
The near-contemporary languages FORTRAN and Algol were not defined in themselves. Exhibiting (for example) an implementation of FORTRAN in FORTRAN would not be enlightening - it would be this big complicated thing that would be much harder to understand than Lisp in Lisp.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/
Many are hand-written in ink, in his distinctive handwriting. They have no cross-outs or corrections. Some are quite long, with pages of mathematical notation. They must have taken a lot of time to prepare. Here is a sample chosen at random, which turned out to be a very nice example:
There is the IBM Jargon File compiled by Mike Cowlishaw at the IBM UK Laboratories in Hursley. The most recent edition is from 1990. As you might expect, it has more about company traditions and workplace politics than the Guy Steele jargon file or its successors.
By the way, it's a good book, well worth reading if you are involved in software development.
Instead, these are mostly reporting and memoir about the tech scene and the social effects of tech from a critical point of view. That's a valid category, and these books are okay, some are quite good. BUT they are almost all from the last few years - I would expect 'greatest of all time' to include some true classics.
My own candidate for greatest of all time in this category is Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum (1976). He wrote Eliza, the very first AI chat program, almost sixty years ago. I reread this book recently and it is still very pertinent, especially his discussion of AI.
Other classics in this category:
Tools for Conviviality Ivan Illich (1973)
The Technological Society Jacques Ellul (1954, English translation 1964)
The Human Use of Human Beings Norbert Wiener (1950)
Technics and Civilization Lewis Mumford (1934)
I admit I have only read brief excerpts from these -- but they have all been influential.
[edit: I see I overlooked the 'still in print' restriction. BUT if you want 'the greatest of all time' you have to relax that.]
On that note, see also Very Short Introductions from Oxford University Press
https://academic.oup.com/very-short-introductions/search-res...
The Survival of LISP http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/lisp20th/node2.html
He describes 15 innovations -- it is impressive that these were all innovations when he invented Lisp. He adds, "Of course, the above doesn't mention features that LISP has in common with most programming languages".
In the 1970s, students at Cal State LA called it Cal Concrete.
The archtype has to be Ted Nelson [1]. He is frequently discussed on HN [2].
1. https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs140/projects/pintos/pintos_...
The author lays on a banquet of fascinating, hilarious, and horrifying episodes to astonish and entertain the reader, and maybe inform them about some things they might not know about. It's not a test, if this style doesn't appeal to you, you don't have to be anxious or defensive about it.
The book is a mosaic, or collage, of a many short pieces ranging from just a few, to several, or many, pages each. They vary from funny and silly to deliberately revolting or horrifying. This mix is very unsettling but I found it effective. Instead of a clear plot or narrative line, all these fragments have a cumulative effect -- this makes the book impossible to summarize.
Scattered amongst the fragments are some with significant mathematical and engineering content. For example there is an explanation of how the onboard V-2 guidance circuits use capacitors to accumulate charge, performing a double integration to calculate distance travelled from acceleration, to determine when to turn off the engine. I found this quite surprising and unusual at the time. I think it still would be today.
Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22692281
A few more here, 2022, 5 comments with about 10 suggestions
Ask HN: Where to learn about computer science and software engineering history?
This was notable because the Review was a continuation of the Whole Earth Catalog and its successors, which were usually enthusiastic about personal computers.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Review
2. https://homes.luddy.indiana.edu/nensmeng/enviro-compute/post...
Despite the title of the book, many of these lessons are not just about AI, or even particularly about symbolic programming or Lisp. They are generally useful advice about programming.