Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to A reference implementation of Turing's paper “On Computable Numbers”
Hey HN! I've been curious about the history of computer science and decided to try to read Turing's 1936 paper where he conceptualizes the Turing Machine, etc. I had trouble understanding the paper, read The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold (which is wonderful), but felt that reading a reference implementation would help formalize my understanding. When I couldn't find an open source implementation, I decided to write my own. The implementation includes: - Abbreviated tables (m-functions) - Conversions to Standard Descriptions and Description Numbers - A working universal machine - A…
This is a reference implementation of Alan Turing's 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers," designed to help developers understand the theoretical foundations of computing. It includes abbreviated tables, conversions to… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. A reference implementation of Turing's paper “On Computable Numbers” launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1IW
The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…
Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca · its alternatives →
- 2
Stephen Wolfram's new book on the Wolfram Language
2015 · wolfram.com · its alternatives →
- 3
My implementations of deterministic and non-deterministic turing machines - yedhukrishnan/turing-machine
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4CA
2017 · billsix.github.io · its alternatives →
- 5
Tim Hartnell was one of the most prolific authors during the early days of the home computing boom, writing many popular books covering genres of games on different platforms and, in this case, artificial intelligence. I've extracted the BASIC program listings from Hartnell's 1986 book 'Exploring Artificial Intelligence on Your IBM PC' and organized them along with a PC-BASIC runtime environment and instructions so you can try these programs out yourself. Even though the AI landscape has changed enormously since Hartnell first wrote this book, I hope one or two of you will get some value out…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Code▲76The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
2016 · namecheap.com · its alternatives →
- 7
2017 · craftinginterpreters.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Building a modern computer from first principles
2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
- 9TM
I recently published a book called “The Magic of Code” which is about the delights of the computational world, examining computing as a kind of “humanistic liberal art” that connects to so many topics, from art and biology to philosophy and language. The link I’ve shared is to a page on my book’s website where you can download a pdf of the introduction, to give HN readers a taste of what is inside. Right now there is so much worry and concern around technology that I feel like some people—though not the folks here—have forgotten how much fun that code and computation can also be. So I wanted…
2025 · themagicofcode.com · its alternatives →
- 10
I’ve been working on a unique storybook designed to teach kids about how computers work, and I would love to get your feedback. Set 500 years in the future, the story follows two kids – one a robot, the other a human – as they explore the workings of what to them is ancient technology: our present-day computers. I’ve aimed to keep each story short and engaging, sprinkling in humor and illustrations to captivate young readers. As an open-source project, you’re also welcome to check out the source here: https://github.com/yong/lostlanguageofthemachines
2024 · lostlanguageofthemachines.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Hey HN, I don’t know who else has the same issue, but: Textbooks often bury good ideas in dense notation, skip the intuition, assume you already know half the material, and get outdated in fast-moving fields like AI. Over the past 7 years of my AI/ML experience, I filled notebooks with intuition-first, real-world context, no hand-waving explanations of maths, computing and AI concepts. In 2024, a few friends used these notes to prep for interviews at DeepMind, OpenAI, Nvidia etc. They all got in and currently perform well in their roles. So I'm sharing. This is an open & unconventional…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12VT
Hi everyone! I'm the author of this project. I wrote it because I think that the math that makes characters move in games and movies is incredibly beautiful, and I wanted to give others a glimpse into it. It's crazy to think that quaternions, an abstract mathematical tool discovered by William Rowan Hamilton in 1843, would be so perfectly suited to solve hard problems in the world of 3D character animation more than a hundred years later. The story of how he discovered quaternions is also beautiful. Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia: "Hamilton was looking for ways of extending complex numbers…
2022 · diegomacario.github.io · its alternatives →
- 13
I have started writing an unusual book discussing various topics in computer science by implementing them from scratch. I would like to know your opinion on it! WARNING: It's a very draft version of it!
2024 · keyvan.me · its alternatives →
- 14
Hi HN, I turned the freshly published paper “The Constructor Theory of Time” by David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto (arXiv, 13 May 2025) into an executable Python library. What you’ll find • One-to-one translation of the paper’s formalism: Substrates, Attributes, Tasks, Constructors, and task-algebra operators • Possibility / impossibility predicates and counterfactuals encoded exactly as defined • Test suite that mirrors every lemma and example (>95 % coverage, mypy-typed) • Reproductions of key results: time-keeping substrates, irreversibility proofs, quantum branching tasks, and a…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
A limited edition notebook by Baron Fig + Codecademy
2018 · baronfig.com · its alternatives →
- 16
"The Bible" of all fundamental algorithms for programming
2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Math to Code is an interactive Python tutorial to teach engineers how to read and implement math using the NumPy library.
2020 · mathtocode.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Computer science curriculum must-read
2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
- 19
I started writing this book 10 years ago in JavaScript, got through a few chapters (asymptotic notation, basic techniques, start of sorting), and then abandoned it. Recently I picked it back up, converted everything to TypeScript, and used AI (Zenflow [1] + Claude Opus 4.6) to complete the remaining chapters. I provided the structure, direction, and initial chapters; the AI generated the bulk of the remaining content under a spec-driven workflow. The book covers roughly a first 1-2 year CS curriculum: sorting, dynamic programming, graph algorithms, trees, heaps, hash tables, and more. All…
Mar 2026 · amoilanen.github.io · its alternatives →
- 20
The Supermen▲66Seymour Cray + technical wizards behind the supercomputer
2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
- 21
A modernized and annotated code companion to Paul Graham's "On Lisp". - DalekBaldwin/on-lisp
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 228C
Hi everybody! Due to Covid 19 pandemic I was forced in my home, so I revamped my book https://8bit.gioorgi.com It is a huge collection of information about the 8bit comnputer era (1980-1985) up to the NES console. I collected information from various source including “The 8bit Guy” videos and specific site (like C64 wiki, nesdev etc). I am using docusaurus to give a pleasnt look to the whole site. Please give me you feedback (and happy new year btw)!
2021 · its alternatives →
- 23
Everything that would be here is in the README. I hope this gets big, it has tons of potential.
2013 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24LA
What if Brainfuck was less like C and more like Scheme? The interpreter implemetation is pretty bad. It's not very fast, it's not very good, and it's probably not very correct. But maybe there's some vaguely interesting programs you could write with it! For example, the Y combinator: λf. (λx. f (x x)) (λx. f (x x)) is written as: \` \`1 `0 0 \`1 `0 0
2025 · imjakingit.github.io · its alternatives →
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