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Work · alternatives · 2026

SM

24 alternatives to Scheme Made Easy

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.

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Scheme Made Easy launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 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. 2

    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 →

  3. 3IM
  4. 4

    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 →

  5. 5

    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 →

  6. 6

    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 →

  7. 7GI

    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 →

  8. 8IW

    As hard as I tried, I didn't find a modern language learning book that's either very academic, or like "master a language with my super-magic great method in 3 months". So I dug into the academic research, tried many techniques myself, saw what worked, wrote a book for learners of any language and any level, and made it free without ads. Today, finally, a 2 years-long project ends. I hope it helps anyone. Book's here: https://thehardway.guide/ Cheers

    2023 · its alternatives →

  9. 9LP

    Hi! I am doing a learning project, attempting to build an imperative language (and interpreter). The end product will be useless for others, I just want to learn and better understand how to build imperative languages. :) If someone else shares this interest and want to give some good hints on good resources I would be grateful. Currently I am looking at an awesome text by Bob Nystrom. All suggestions and tips on resources are most welcome. I am very much a beginner in this, but I find this topic very fascinating. Mail me or post links here! Cheers! You can try a beta version Online at…

    2020 · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Everything that would be here is in the README. I hope this gets big, it has tons of potential.

    2013 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11IW
  12. 12

    Dmitri's blog about programming, Clojure, and software development

    Jul 2026 · yogthos.net · its alternatives →

  13. 13IM

    just a wack systems dude tbh

    2018 · h313.info · its alternatives →

  14. 14CO

    First tutorial to date. Writing your first C program, includes a link at the bottom with a detailed look at printf() as optional reading. I would love some feedback, as I intend writing up a lot of dev articles for people to learn from : www.xanthu.com/first-c-program

    2013 · its alternatives →

  15. 15AA
  16. 16

    Hi All, I've been writing a series on Galois Fields / Finite Fields from a computer programmer's perspective. It's essentially the guide that I wanted when I first learned the subject. I imagine it as a guide that could gently onboard anyone that is interested in the subject. I don't assume too much mathematical background beyond high-school level algebra. However, in some applications (for example: Reed-Solomon), familiarity with Linear Algebra is required. All code is written in a Literate Programming style. Code is written as reference implementations and I try hard to make…

    2025 · xorvoid.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    A lisp-looking language with interpreter and compiler to JS - mcapodici/badlanguage

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hi everyone, I’m a student with a strong interest in computer science and complexity theory. Recently, I worked on a manuscript attempting to prove that P ≠ NP. I know how this sounds — it’s one of the hardest and most debated problems in CS, and many have tried and failed. I don’t claim to have the final answer, but I believe the approach I used might at least offer some fresh perspective or provoke useful critique. The idea involves geometric separation between deterministic and nondeterministic computation, using high-dimensional lattice constructions and some physics-inspired intuition.…

    2025 · zenodo.org · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    I have been interested in neural nets since the 90's. I've done quite a bit of reading, but never gotten around to writing code. I used Gemini in place of Wikipedia to fill in the gaps of my knowledge. The coolest part of this was learning about dual numbers. You can see in early commits that I did not yet know about auto-diff; I was thinking I'd have to integrate a CAS library or something. Now, I'm off to play with TensorFlow.

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20IA

    Software Engineer in New York specializing in Apple platforms

    2015 · harlanhaskins.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21AV
  22. 22IW

    I wrote my own lightweight markup language, similar to Markdown, that compiles to both HTML5 and LaTeX, supports LaTeX equations (through svgtex, i.e. serverside MathJax), references, captioned figures with semantically correct tag in html, syntax highlighted code blocks, and so on. http://www.dllu.net/programming/dllup/ See the text file written in dllup markup language: http://www.dllu.net/programming/dllup/index.dllu and the PDF and LaTeX versions: http://www.dllu.net/programming/dllup/index.pdf…

    2015 · its alternatives →

  23. 23FT

    After six months of work, I am here again presenting Fluent – a tiny lang which is optimized for differentiable & reactive programming. Since I am not Conal Elliot, don't expect a beautiful theoretical unification of FRP and AD from first principles. Rather, a horrific monster that holds together mostly because a lot of duct-tape. The link points to the semi-interactive tour of the language, which will get the job done much better than I could in here. Hope you hate/like it!

    Jul 2026 · mlajtos.github.io · its alternatives →

  24. 24WS

    This is the first project I haven't written a single line of code. The entire codebase was prompt generated in Cursor using mostly Claude Sonnet 4.5. It's also the first time I'm genuinely happy with the end result from AI coding. What do you think?

    Dec 2025 · wordsnake.co · its alternatives →

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