Frank Herbert is well known for his Dune series, but less known is a computer book he wrote back in 1980.
It's good.
This computer book explains a lot of "big picture" design and philosophy issues along with the nuts and bolts of setting up a 1970s style microcomputer. Consequently, it's still useful, because you can now ignore the details and read over the ideas.
The listing shows a couple excerpted pages about programming language ideas.
This was back in the days of 16 kilobyte memories, and 64 kilobyte address spaces.
For sale: https://www.ebay.com/itm/263894306485