Alan Kay's answer to Experienced programmers and computer scientists, what are some really old (or even nearly forgotten) books you think every new programmer should read?

BRANK

I love that “2006” and “2008” (in another answer) must be considered “really old” (which is what the question requests) …I’m still a big fan of the “Lisp 1.5 Programmers Manual” (MIT Press — still in print). This version of the language is no longer with us, but the book — first written ca 1962 — by John McCarthy, who invented, and his colleagues, who implemented, is a perfect classic.It starts with a version of John’s first papers about Lisp, and develops the ideas in a few pages of examples to culminate on page 13 with Lisp eval and apply defined in itself. There are many other thought provoking ideas and examples throughout the rest of the book.The way to grow from this book is to deeply learn what they did and how they did it, and then try to rewrite page 13 in a number of ways. How nicely can this be written in “a lisp” using recursion. How nicely can this be written without recursion? (In both cases, look ahead in the book to see that Lisp 1.5 had gotten to the i…