Hacker News Reader

Comment by sixothree | Hacker News Reader

And not a single reference to Programming Language Pragmatics.

PLP is pretty good, but I found it didn't live up to the reviews and recommendations. The chapter at the beginning on parsing just flew by too fast to be genuinely useful. The rest of it seemed to follow that trend of breadth rather than depth.

That being said, I found EOPL 3ed also didn't live up to it's reputation. I don't really know what I'm looking for in an introductory PL text, something that could bridge the divide between the end of SICP and the more advanced, serious PL stuff. I don't know if such a text exists.

The older EOPLs are much longer then the newer ones. I've found that the 1st edition requires less sophistication than the 3rd and spends more time explaining things. You might want to take a look at it.

There's also "design concepts in programming languages".

Thanks, I'll check them out.

Have you looked at Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation [1] by Krishnamurthi? It doesn't address your concern about parsing---it's explicitly excluded from the book---but I found it to be a reasonable follow-on to SICP and a relatively enjoyable read to boot.

[1] http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/

PLAI is on my short list for new reading, but thanks, that's good to know re: parsing.

I actually think that skipping parsing altogether, the way a lot of Lispy texts do is the way to go for intro PL stuff, because you can get to interesting stuff much faster.

My gripe about PLP is that after deciding to cover parsing and scanning, he goes too fast. I might have been happier if he'd skipped it altogether.

I wish my list for new reading was short. Amazon wishlist is near 1000 books now :(

I found all the interesting bits are in the accompanying CD rather than in the book itself, which is far too shallow (IMO). Having to dig out the CD to read the somewhat interesting bits is then a chore.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com