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Practical Foundations for Programming Languages
- AndrewO 14y agoLooks interesting, but can we get some background about why it's particularly remarkable? I haven't heard of the author, and though it's an interesting topic, there seem to be a lot of other textbooks in the same field. What's special about this one?
- noblethrasher 14y agoThe author is an accomplished computer scientist in his own right but he's recently become more (in)famous for his critiques of Haskell in his new blog: http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/ http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/ Here's a recent HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4380900 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4380900
- jmount 14y agoHe is one of the major experts on type systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Harper_(computer_scientist) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Harper_(computer_scienti...
- jdale27 14y agoFree draft: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/plbook/book.pdf http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/plbook/book.pdf (Get it while you can... Publishers often require authors to take down drafts once the book is published.)
- phao 14y agoThanks!
- imurray 14y ago> Get it while you can This book is published by Cambridge University Press who have a good track record for allowing electronic copies to stay up [1]. It will be interesting to see how they adapt as e-readers become a compelling alternative to hard-copy for this type of text of book. I'm afraid I won't like the answer. [1] Examples: http://www.stanford.edu/~boyd/cvxbook/ http://www.stanford.edu/~boyd/cvxbook/ http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html
- icebraining 14y agoIt's CC licensed, so anyone can distribute a copy. It doesn't matter if the author takes it down.
- jdale27 14y agoOops, I missed that. Thanks for the correction.
- carterschonwald 14y agoI remember reading a draft of it in high school, and finding a typo, in 2004 I think? Led to my first email interaction with Bob, 'twas my first real correspondence with a professional computer scientist! It led to some very very fun reading PLT reading recommendations that kept me busy! :) That said, this master tome is not light reading, but I really should take a week this fall to work through it!
- inexhaling 14y ago590 pages in 1.66 MB, that's already a reliable indicator for an intense reading experience...
- Bjoern 14y agoPrice: $72.81 Wonder how much Harper gets from that.