Book recommendations about the history of programming

16 points by sys_prog 2 years ago | 9 comments

For example, any books explaining how people programmed professionally before OOP, the problems they were having and how OOP emerged.

colund 2 years ago |

If you want to learn how some of the most famous programmers of the 80s were sketching, coding and thinking, I strongly recommend the wonderful book "Programmers at work" https://www.amazon.com/Programmers-work-Interviews-Susan-Lam....

It has been one of my favorite books about programmers and programming since my childhood.

japhyr 2 years ago |

UNIX: A History and a Memoir | Brian Kernhigan

For me, this book finally told the human story behind so many CLI commands and ideas I'd been using for decades.

https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d...

jjice 2 years ago | |

Came here to post this. Great book and it's got so much heart. Brian is obviously a great writer and has a lot of great stories about the Bell Labs days. Early UNIX just seems like a dream to have been around.

It's a very human focused book, and the humans it focuses on are just incredible.

Rochus 2 years ago |

The computer boys take over - computers, programmers, and the politics of technical expertise (2012): https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Boys-Take-Over-Programmers/d...

Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (2009): https://www.amazon.com/Invention-Information-Lemelson-Studie...

From airline reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog - a history of the software industry (2003): https://www.amazon.com/Airline-Reservations-Sonic-Hedgehog-C...

brudgers 2 years ago |

Knuth’s Art of Computer Programming “footnotes” the history of computing throughout it’s text; shows how it was done because Knuth has been writing it for most of the time computers have been machines and not people; and invented a fair portion of how computing has been done.

Ableson and Susman’s SICP is full of structured data without using objects.

And the less famous Structured Programming by Michael Jackson (no not that one) is also good. Jackson talks about “tables” and that’s what OOP languages abstract over as objects.

Just as tables abstract over pointers and pointers abstract over jmp instructions.

Good luck.

qohen 2 years ago |

Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World's First Modern Computer [0] by Kathryn Kleiman.

It's about the women who programmed the ENIAC computer[1] in the 1940's.

[0] https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/kathy-kleiman/provi...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC#Programming

sargstuff 2 years ago |

* A Brief History | Babbage Engine : https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/history/

* https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/insider-memb...

* First OOP programming language was Simula (~1961). : ( https://history-computer.com/simula-guide/ / https://twobithistory.org/2019/01/31/simula.html )

* simula : https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/a-detailed-1978-history-of...

* Simula & smalltalk : https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~charlie/courses/15-214/2014-fall/sli...

* Coding From 1849 to 2022: a Guide to The Timeline of Programming Languages by Severine Hierso https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/insider-memb...

* "Hello, World!": The History of Programming Paperback by Prof James Steinberg (Author)

* Software: A Technical History (ACM Books) by Kim W Tracy (Author)

* The Dawn of Software Engineering: from Turing to Dijkstra by Edgar G. Daylight (Author), Niklaus Wirth (Author), et. al

* History of Programming Languages (Acm Monograph Series) by Richard L. Wexelblat (Editor)

* Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)) by Federico Biancuzzi (Author), Chromatic (Author)

Related with narrower, non-OOP focus:

* Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think by Andy Oram (Author), Greg Wilson (Author)

* Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick Brooks Jr. (Author)

* 6 programming languages invented by women : https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/6-programming-languages-that-a...

* Just what is TeX? : https://www.tug.org/whatis.html

* MUMPS : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS

* CAche Objectscript : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cach%C3%A9_ObjectScript

hnthrowaway0328 2 years ago |

A side question: Is there any book that talks about a software/hardware project from the technical side, but not too technical to scare away people. I'm thinking about something similar to "Soul of the Machine" and "Show Stopper" (but I think they are not as technical as I want).