What are your favourite FoC-related books? (Or other sources)

I saw your tweet! Planning to respond.

While I’ve only skimmed through it, this stanford course seems pretty solid : https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs208e/cgi-bin/main.cgi/ There is also an associated “text” put together by the course instructor : https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs208e/reader/CS54N-CS208E-Reader.pdf

My answer is "no book", if you'll accept that. I've never found a single resource that has given me a substantial vision of what the future of coding should be like (apart from perhaps Bret Victor's stuff). As far as I'm aware, my current vision is a collage of tiny extracts from hundreds of resources. That probably isn't helpful 😅. I think we should write the book we'd like to have read by now.

For me, "The Humane Interface" by Jef Raskin got me into the whole FoC world.

From the Language Design centric point-of-view, of the top of my mind. (With all those sources, the reader will have to do almost all the work themselves, but still, this is good stuff!) • Cognitive Grammar by Ronald Langacker (far too wordy introduction and still far away from readily applicable stuff, but this is as close as current linguistics get to practical PLD usefulness imo) • For the language designer, learning the Language Esperanto fluently imo offers an intuitive feel/exploration tool for human grammar that not much else will • All of Rich Hickeys talks/transcripts will reduce fear of transforming deep philosophy into practical language design • Constructing the User Interface with Statecharts (yes, there is a free pdf somewhere on the web!) this is a mind-opener in a very practical sense • David Harel’s original statechart paper and especially his paper On Visual Formalisms (avoid all papers about how to merge statecharts with OO, as that added some tooling for handling complexity in OO, but detracted from imo more fruitful directions such as generalizing (like letting them mingle with ADT’s 🙂 ) and in general adapting statecharts for PLD needs) I quite like historical papers and books, not so much for what they say about the future but for what they convey about the mindset of invention, here are some: + Andrew Hodges Alan Turing biography (the book; avoid the film at all costs) + Rich Hickeys HOPL paper + David Harel’s Statecharts in the Making: A Personal Account etc.

Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted Nelson is my personal favorite! I'll also recommend The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell which is a neat way to view designing systems that lead users to achieve challenging goals (programming languages can definitely be seen through that lens) while keeping things fun.

Mindstorms https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindstorms_(book) is mind bending

The Best Interface Is No Interface - short and sweet one, that challenged how I thought about interacting with computers

Thanks all. I have plenty of lockdown reading now 🙂

This FoC podcast interview with Jonathan Edwards crystallized things for me: both diagnosing many issues with computing today (fragile, complicated, inhumane), and his brutal honesty of how hard it has been to progress. https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/037

There’s also this book from Daniel Jackson of MIT (whose lecture I had posted a week or two ago) https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691225388/the-essence-of-software

👍

Mostly about history: • The Dream Machine. The vision of J. C. R. Licklider • Tools for Thought. The History and Future of Mind-expanding Technology (1985)

Oh, history! • _The Soul of a New Machine_

@karki That was a great recommendation, thanks 🙂