Elements of Programming (2009)

Alexander Stepanov also has <i>Notes on Programming</i> (a series of lectures he gave at various companies) which is what this and his other published books are based on. You can find the link to it in the &quot;reference&quot; section of his wikipedia page - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Alexander_Stepanov" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Alexander_Stepanov</a><p>I have all of his books and they are all great (though not easy!). His starting point is &quot;Algebraic Structures&quot; (basically sets of objects and operations defined on them eg. Groupoid&#x2F;SemiGroup&#x2F;Monoid&#x2F;Group etc.) and so some familiarity with Abstract Algebra&#x2F;Discrete Mathematics is assumed. The mapping he does from the mathematics to a language construct modeling a concept is what gives one the insight into programming. His other book <i>From Mathematics to Generic Programming</i> gives one a more &quot;easier&quot; approach to the subject and should be read in conjunction with this one for better understanding.<p>A related old book is <i>Ruminations on C++: A Decade of Programming Insight and Experience</i> by Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo. This is derived from a collection of articles written by Koenig when he was working closely with Stepanov on his ideas and implementation of STL. His idea of programming templates in a functional and generic manner is what is conveyed in this book in the &quot;templates&quot; section and is still quite illuminating (no math but short C++ code in articles). So something which might not be clear from Stepanov&#x27;s mathematical treatment may be clearer here since you can see an actual C++ implementation (warts and all).

Related. Others?<p><i>Elements of Programming (2019)</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32459443">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32459443</a> - Aug 2022 (11 comments)<p><i>Elements of Programming</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20437347">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20437347</a> - July 2019 (24 comments)<p><i>Alex Stepanov (STL) just published a book on math foundations of programming</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=665987">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=665987</a> - June 2009 (1 comment)

If you are passionate about programming and and computer science, this is the book to read. It&#x27;s like Euclid&#x27;s elements, but for programming.

Historically, this is based on what is described here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Alexander_Stepanov#Standard_Template_Library_and_generic_programming" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Alexander_Stepanov#Standard_Te...</a>

I&#x27;ve found this book, and Stepanov&#x27;s previous work, to be among the most insightful ways of thinking about programming. But it&#x27;s hard to distill, and we could wish for a much better language than C++ to express these ideas in.

The year in the HN title looks wrong, in the PDF it says 2019, please fix it, otherwise people ignore the book thinking it&#x27;s too outdated.<p>Oh wait. I stand corrected - I missed that it said &quot;Copyright 2009&quot;, &quot;First printing 2019&quot;, not sure why it took so long to get it printed.