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"Don't forget Peter van Roys Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming" yes I have this too. But I haven't worked through it so I didn't want to

"Don't forget Peter van Roys Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming" yes I have this too. But I haven't worked through it so I didn't want to reccomend it blindly. Many talented hackers(e.g Peter Norvig) say good things about this book so I am sure it is great. The language it uses (Oz) is a bit flaky wrt syntax but VERY powerful. Another recent lovely book, though a bit on the formal side is Gifford and Turbak'S Design Concepts In programming languages. (Another 1000 + pages !! - the road to compiler gurudom has many 1000 page books to work through!).I am working though this and I am enjoying it thoroughly. I hope to finish it by the end of this year.

dkersten 17y ago
By the way, thanks for the book suggestions - some great ones there that I have yet to read! CTM is good, it covers a lot of theory of programming techniques and IMHO a must read for anybody interested in programming language design. Oz syntax is a bit quirky and weird, but the language seems to be quite powerful and very flexible, supporting many varied types of programming. I have not read all of it yet, but most - not exactly light reading :-) I will definitely check out the other books which you mentioned though.
- plinkplonk 17y ago
  "By the way, thanks for the book suggestions - some great ones there that I have yet to read!" You are welcome! I had to work through some really awful books before I put all the pieces together and stumbled onto the good books. Even most good books omit some crucial piece (E.g EOPL , as good as it is, doesn't say anything about how to write a garbage collector/memory management infrastructure, SICP doesn't deal with lexing/parsing or type checking and so on.)
silentbicycle 17y ago
CTM is a great book, but not about programming language implementation so much as a tour through the big ideas in different programming paradigms. I can't recommend it too highly - it's one of the most readable textbooks I've seen, and it's refreshingly non-dogmatic about the subject material. Usually, language books are heavy-handed about OOP / Lisp / FP / whatever being best, but CTM's thesis is that, since they all have strengths and weaknesses, it's most practical to learn what they do best and how to use them in a complementary fashion. It covers declarative programming, functional programming, several concurrency models, logic programming, object-oriented programming, dataflow programming, and probably a half dozen things I'm forgetting. The book uses Oz* , with major asides using Haskell, Erlang, Java, Prolog, and probably a couple others. There's a draft PDF floating around, but if you like it, I'd highly recommend buying the book. (Same with SICP.) * Which seems like an interesting language, though I've never gotten it to build on OpenBSD, so I've done exercises in OCaml, Lua, or Scheme instead.

dkersten 17y ago

By the way, thanks for the book suggestions - some great ones there that I have yet to read! CTM is good, it covers a lot of theory of programming techniques and IMHO a must read for anybody interested in programming language design. Oz syntax is a bit quirky and weird, but the language seems to be quite powerful and very flexible, supporting many varied types of programming. I have not read all of it yet, but most - not exactly light reading :-) I will definitely check out the other books which you mentioned though.

plinkplonk 17y ago
"By the way, thanks for the book suggestions - some great ones there that I have yet to read!" You are welcome! I had to work through some really awful books before I put all the pieces together and stumbled onto the good books. Even most good books omit some crucial piece (E.g EOPL , as good as it is, doesn't say anything about how to write a garbage collector/memory management infrastructure, SICP doesn't deal with lexing/parsing or type checking and so on.)

silentbicycle 17y ago

CTM is a great book, but not about programming language implementation so much as a tour through the big ideas in different programming paradigms. I can't recommend it too highly - it's one of the most readable textbooks I've seen, and it's refreshingly non-dogmatic about the subject material. Usually, language books are heavy-handed about OOP / Lisp / FP / whatever being best, but CTM's thesis is that, since they all have strengths and weaknesses, it's most practical to learn what they do best and how to use them in a complementary fashion. It covers declarative programming, functional programming, several concurrency models, logic programming, object-oriented programming, dataflow programming, and probably a half dozen things I'm forgetting. The book uses Oz* , with major asides using Haskell, Erlang, Java, Prolog, and probably a couple others. There's a draft PDF floating around, but if you like it, I'd highly recommend buying the book. (Same with SICP.) * Which seems like an interesting language, though I've never gotten it to build on OpenBSD, so I've done exercises in OCaml, Lua, or Scheme instead.