Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to “Crafting Interpreters” chapter, control flow and Turing-completeness

Crafting Interpreters" is a chapter-based guide on control flow in programming language design. It explains how adding control flow structures enables an interpreter to become Turing-complete, allowing programs to… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. “Crafting Interpreters” chapter, control flow and Turing-completeness launched in 2017; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

1. 1
   Crafting Interpreters – A handbook for making programming languages▲423

   2017 · craftinginterpreters.com · its alternatives →

2. 2
   “Statements and State”, the next chapter of my book on interpreters▲141

   2017 · craftinginterpreters.com · its alternatives →

3. 3
   Open Interpreter▲182

   Control your computer with natural language

   2023 · openinterpreter.com · its alternatives →

4. 4IW
   I wrote a technical history book on Lisp▲252

   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 →

5. 5
   A small programming language where everything is pass-by-value▲91

   This is a hobby project of mine that I started a few years ago to learn about programming language implementation. It was created 95% without AI, although a few recent commits include code from Gemini CLI. I started out following Crafting Interpreters, but gradually branched off that until I had almost nothing left in common. Tech stack: Rust, Cranelift (JIT compilation), LALRPOP (parser). Original title: "A small programming language where everything is a value" (edited based on comments)

   Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

6. 6
   Maybe Haskell▲60

   See what it’s like to program in a language without null.

   2015 · books.thoughtbot.com · its alternatives →

7. 7
   Crafting Interpreters▲3

   A handbook for making programming languages.

   2017 · craftinginterpreters.com · its alternatives →

8. 8
   Create diagrams of complex data flows in software systems▲205

   Hello HN, It has been a while since I contributed to the web, so I decided to get back in shape and publish "something". This app is a POC of "what if diagrams were more dynamic". I'm a software engineer by trade, and with conventional tools, I often times struggle to explain flows of data in complex software systems. I got inspired by video games like The Incredible Machine and Factorio, as in some ways, software systems tend to become Rube Goldberg-esque machines ;) As a side quest, I also wanted to craft diagrams faster than text-based tools (ex: mermaid), as I am always forgetting their…

   2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

9. 9AP
   A playground for in-browser interpreters▲79

   2015 · fatiherikli.github.io · its alternatives →

10. 10
    Algorithms and Data Structures in TypeScript – Free Book (~400 Pages)▲65

    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 →

11. 11
    20+ Claude Code agents coordinating on real work (open source)▲53

    Single-agent LLMs suck at long-running complex tasks. We’ve open-sourced a multi-agent orchestrator that we’ve been using to handle long-running LLM tasks. We found that single LLM agents tend to stall, loop, or generate non-compiling code, so we built a harness for agents to coordinate over shared context while work is in progress. How it works: 1. Orchestrator agent that manages task decomposition 2. Sub-agents for parallel work 3. Subscriptions to task state and progress 4. Real-time sharing of intermediate discoveries between agents We tested this on a Putnam-level math problem, but the…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

12. 12GI
    Going into freshman year, figured I should build an interpreter▲138

    Hi all! I'm going into my freshman year, and figured that the best way to prepare for the intro to programming Racket course would be to implement my own garbage-collected, dynamically typed, functional programming language in C ;) Anyways... here's the repo: https://github.com/liam-ilan/crumb I started learning C over the summer, so I still have a whole lot to learn... Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! :D

    2023 · its alternatives →

13. 13
    Code Completion, by Kite▲90

    AI-powered autocomplete engine for 13 languages and 16 IDEs

    2020 · kite.com · its alternatives →

14. 14LA
    Lambduck, a Functional Programming Brainfuck▲70

    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 →

15. 15
    The Art of Computer Programming▲91

    "The Bible" of all fundamental algorithms for programming

    2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

16. 16
    Haskell Programming▲66

    Great book with a low barrier to entry for learning Haskell

    2016 · haskellbook.com · its alternatives →

17. 17
    The Pragmatic Programmer▲87

    Solid advice and awesome analogies

    2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

18. 18MW
    My "weekend" project, an ML dialect and compiler▲68

    2012 · texodus.github.com · its alternatives →

19. 19
    Writing An Interpreter In Go▲68

    Learn how to build your own programming language interpreter

    2016 · interpreterbook.com · its alternatives →

20. 20
    Code Complete 2▲78

    One of the best practical guides to programming

    2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

21. 21
    Purely Functional Data Structures▲61

    A guide to functional programming

    2016 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

22. 22CA
    Computation at Compile-Time now free online▲57

    2017 · billsix.github.io · its alternatives →

23. 23
    A design-by-contract Python package in ~100 lines▲58

    Greetings! A 2.5 weekends project to teach myself newer Python features (>= 3.10). Conditions are written as Lambda expressions that annotate parameters and return types, and coexist with type annotations. Symbols to share values between conditions are also supported to a limited extend.

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

24. 24
    I wrote a VM and Compiler for a small language in Go▲37

    My implementation of Thorsten Bell's book (Writing an Interpreter in Go) - actuallyachraf/monkey-giggle

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →