Ask HN: What's the best writing about programming you've ever read?

2 points

2 years ago

Could be a blog post, a novel, or a really well-written README.

I'm looking for something written mostly in human language that captures the joy of successfully debugging something really complex, the awe of understanding the halting problem and Turing machines for the first time, or the feeling of reading code that is so "elegant" or well-composed you can't imagine how to justify writing it another way.

Not looking for anything that's not really related to code itself. Things that I really like that DON'T scratch that specific itch:

- The Matrix

- "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" by Ted Chiang

- This xkcd comic about programming: https://xkcd.com/303/

Things that DO scratch the itch:

- This xkcd comic about programming: https://xkcd.com/378/

- A hypothetically open-source version of a Java class of proprietary internal code I could not share

- The "Zalgo" StackOverflow answer

- "Randomize" by Andy Weir

- This short story I came across a while ago named Manifest Logic: https://omnisplore.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/manifest-logic/

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