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Thinking ForthBook

by Leo Brodie

Who uses, recommends or left Thinking Forth, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

1 person

Adam Tornhill
Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology; author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.
loved

Thinking Forth by Leo Brodie. I used to have this habit where I learned various programming languages. To challenge my perspective, I chose languages from families and paradigms that were fundamentally different from what I already knew. Occasionally, I stumbled upon greatness. Thinking Forth presents programming as a creative process, and it delivers those lessons in an entertaining and pedagogical way. The book is particularly strong on software analysis and design, but it's the execution and technical writing that brought the book to my top five. This is the book for anyone writing about software — Leo's way is the way to do it.

A post naming the pre-2015 programming books that changed how he thinks about code, plus his take on the usual classics.

2026-08-11·adamtornhill.substack.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.