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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

IW

24 alternatives to I wrote a technical history book on Lisp

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…

This is a technical history book on Lisp that combines historical narrative with extensive code examples. Written over five years by someone seeking a computer history resource that included substantial technical… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1IM
  2. 2IW

    https://www.manning.com/books/data-oriented-programming-in-j... This book is a distillation of everything I’ve learned about what effective development looks like in Java (so far!). It's about how to organize programs around data "as plain data" and the surprisingly benefits that emerge when we do. Programs that are built around the data they manage tend to be simpler, smaller, and significantly easier understand. Java has changed radically over the last several years. It has picked up all kinds of new language features which support data oriented programming (records,…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  3. 3MB
  4. 4

    Hi HN! I kept hearing about Lisp and why it was special but didn't have a great place to start. I wanted something self-contained that helped me develop intuition rather than fluency. My hope is this is helpful for casual programmers, professionals from other fields who interact with code, or engineers who haven't had much exposure to interpreters or compilers. Hope this helps anyone else who's curious about getting a sense of Lisp and what makes it special with a limited time investment! Feedback or other cool Lisp things welcome :)

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    A modernized and annotated code companion to Paul Graham's "On Lisp". - DalekBaldwin/on-lisp

    2015 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6PA
  7. 7

    The notebook-style Common Lisp environment. Contribute to tamamu/darkmatter development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8FS
  9. 9

    Hey HN, I just wanted to share that after five months of intense work and countless caffeine-fueled writing sessions, "Master Software Architecture: A Pragmatic Guide" is now available. Writing this book was a crazy time. I entirely focused on it, and it took exactly 753 hours of writing, editing, and image editing & resizing(!) until the premiere. Yes, the last one (images) was a killer. If you ever think about writing a book, reserve a lot of time for it unless someone else does it for you. As a result, I am handing you the nearly 400-page book. It is a guide that will help you connect all…

    2024 · leanpub.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Hey HN! I wrote a book on programming called The Elements of Code. I put the entire book online here: https://elementsofcode.io/ When mentoring (usually new) programmers, I noticed there were a few common mistakes that seemed to account for about 80% of the complexity in their code. I couldn’t find a concise guide to fixing those mistakes, so I decided to write one. The title is an homage to The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, which is the classic guide for communicating well using prose. That guide is quite tactical in nature, and I wanted to parallel its focus in The…

    2021 · pragprog.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hey HN, I wrote a short book about the fundamental aspects of Clojure. The target audience is programmers with at least minimal experience who want to learn how to express solutions in Clojure (and perhaps in LISP, generally). If the price is a bit too steep for you, send me an email (address in bio), and I'll provide a discount coupon. If you can't afford it all, and believe the material may help you for studying or interview preparations, I can send you a free copy.

    2025 · leanpub.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12
    Code▲76

    The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

    2016 · namecheap.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Great book with a low barrier to entry for learning Haskell

    2016 · haskellbook.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    I created this because sometimes I want more than rlwrap but less than emacs. icl aims to hit that middle sweet spot. It's a terminal application with context-aware auto-complete, an interactive object inspector, auto-indentation, syntax colouring, persistent history, and much more. It uses sly to communicate with the child lisp process and aims to be compatible with any sly-supporting implementation. I hope others find it useful!

    Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15IM

    Hello. This year I dived into UI/UX area and at the same time I work as a web developer. I sincerely love making good UI. But at my full time job it's not always possible due to different reasons =\ So I've been posting random UI/UX staff on Twitter, then I made a free book that had 50 tips (posted it here as well). I decided to finish this year by collecting everything I learned and here it is: https://akcium.gumroad.com/l/ui-ux-tips. This time it's a paid one. But, you can check ~20 pages of it, just go to…

    2021 · its alternatives →

  16. 16

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

    2015 · books.thoughtbot.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17GI

    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 →

  18. 18

    Clever solutions to classic programming problems

    2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Interviews with the 15 most interesting computer programmers

    2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    An Introduction

    2017 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Solid advice and awesome analogies

    2015 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22SM

    In past few weeks, I wrote several chapters to learn Scheme, a programming language of the Lisp dialect. The writing is not final as many chapters are missing. I wrote this because I wanted to improve my Scheme knowledge and increase the (low) number of Scheme literature. The writing is inspired by Calculus Made Easy, which I learned about here on HN. This is why I'm sharing it here. But keep in mind that my writing style is not as good as that in the above-mentioned inspiration. Feedback is very much appreciated.

    2024 · schememadeeasy.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    An experimental minimal chat written in Common Lisp - ryukinix/lisp-chat

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    The authoritative resource for learning Go

    2016 · amazon.com · its alternatives →

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