Thinking Forth
by Leo Brodie · first published 1984
77% recommend21% neutral2% critical
Why HN recommends it
Language-agnostic software design advice: naming, factoring, commenting, and decomposition, delivered through the Forth mindset. Readers say it reshaped how they write code in any language, and it's free online.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…I read most of chapters 3, 4, and 5 of SICP in one night and the following morning. (I'm on the second pass, doing most of the exercises, and nearly done with chapter 2. I'm taking a break, though.) _Thinking Forth_, by Leo Brodie et al. _The Awk Programming Language_ by Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan. _Programming Pearls_ and _More Programming Pearls_ by Jon Bentley. I couldn't put _CTM_ (http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html)…
on “Which programming book you just couldn’t stop reading from start to end?” ↗…what can be done with computers, and that they are marvelous machines. - Architecture of Symbolic Computers - Kogge An ode to what could have been if RISC and x86 hadn't steamrolled the landscape. - Thinking Forth - Leo Brodie Forth is wild, this book is wild, it's really a different world. After multiple attempts over 25 years, I'm giving it another go this year and this time it is actually clicking. - Malicious…
on “Quirky computing books” ↗Forth is not just another language for the sake of it. I am currently learning Forth from Leo Brodie's excellent books "Starting Forth" and "Thinking Forth". It actually changes the way you think. Just as Lisp does - almost a feeling of "a new planet swims into his ken". The main feature of the Forth style is to write lots of 1 to 2 line functions, in such…
on “zForth – Tiny, embeddable, flexible, compact Forth for embedded systems” ↗…Aho and Weinberger and Kernighan, The AWK Programming Language Andrew Appel, Compiling With Continuations Jon Bentley, More Programming Pearls Jon Bentley, Programming Pearls Leo Brodie, Thinking FORTH W. H. Burge, Recursive Programming Techniques Carriero and Gelernter, How to Write Parallel Programs A. K. Dewdney, The New Turing Omnibus Edsger Dijkstra, A Discipline of Programming…
on “Which programming book you just couldn’t stop reading from start to end?” ↗…this thread cover Functional (SICP, Haskell books), Logic (Prolog Books), and Procedural/OO (Almost everything else) Languages, so I figure I should add a reference for Stack/Concatenative Languages: Thinking Forth - Brodie
on “Must Read CS Books For Self Self-Taught Programmers” ↗…FORTH tutorial is available online: Starting FORTH — Online Edition: https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/ I had read it and played around with FORTH on a microcomputer some years ago. Fun language. Thinking FORTH, a more advanced book, also by Leo Brodie, is also linked to from the above URL.
on “Forth: The Hacker’s Language” ↗The author of Thinking Forth is Leo Brodie. From Chuck Moore, the father of Forth, "1X Forth" ( http://www.ultratechnology.com/1xforth.htm ) is worth reading before and after Thinking Forth.
on “Show HN: A Lispy, embedded Forth” ↗…and used in functions which then return data to the stack so functions can be chained (kind of like Unix pipes). Leo Brodie's books on Forth (classics and free online) are called "Learning Forth" and "Thinking Forth" and are recommended on HN sometimes.
on “Compilers for Free” ↗Leo Brodie's book Thinking Forth gives a powerful insight into ways to think. It's also about the RPN language Forth.
on “Ask HN: Do Any ‘Coding Paradigms’ Influence the Structure of Your Thinking?” ↗How Computers Work - Roger Young Thinking Forth - Leo Brodie
on “Ask HN: What are the best short tech/engineering books you have read?” ↗I've read some of the books listed, but the two books that completely changed how I write code weren't---_Writing Solid Code_ by Steve Maquire and _Thinking Forth_ by Leo Brodie. The second one is by far the more mind bending of the two, and it's available online (for free) if you search for it.
on “What is the single most influential book every programmer should read?” ↗…wouldn't even recommend the first couple from my list, today -- e.g. there are surely better intros to algorithms now. But here's an approximate top 5 for changing my programming when I read them. Brodie, Thinking Forth Sedgewick, Algorithms Abelson & Sussman, SICP Liskov & Guttag, Abstraction and Specification in Program Development Norvig, PAIP It's hard to stick to 5!
on “The Programming Books That Meant The Most To Me” ↗Thinking Forth was published the same year and is still very relevant. http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Forth-Leo-Brodie/dp/097645870...
on “Why SICP Matters” ↗'Graph Databases' by Ian Robinson, Jim Webber, and Emil Eifrem 'Hackers and Painters' by Paul Graham 'Virtual Reality' by Howard Rheingold 'Stack Computers: The New Wave' by Philip Koopman 'Thinking Forth' by Leo Brodie 'WIMP Programming for All on Acorn RISC Computers' by Lee Calcraft and Alan Wrigley 'Frank Herbert' by Timothy O'Reilly 'Modern Painters: volume 1' by John Ruskin 'Aratra Pentelici'…
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in 2013” ↗…reading: Brad Cox: Superdistribution: Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier Brad Cox: Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach Jason Brennan: Why Not Capitalism? Leo Brodie: Thinking Forth
on “Ask HN: What book changed your life in 2014?” ↗