I was fortunate enough to encounter this book in a first-year programming course (Informatik, RWTH Aachen). The years before, they had used Modula-3 and in the years afterwards they switched to Java.

While it certainly changed my life - first encounter with functional programming - and I will always appreciate it, it is now 23 years later and I think it is time to acknowledge some shortcomings.

The thing that comes to my mind first is the lack of any discussion pertaining to coding against interfaces, with components (and their interfaces) evolving over time.

Data abstraction gets discussed very early on, but the evolution of interfaces, its twin sister topic, does not get much air time. This is a pity since the goal of data abstraction (avoiding making assumptions on data representation) is pretty much the same, being able to change things later when the need arises.