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Comment by dpkendal | Hacker News Reader

If Cambridge made a textbook of this, and did it right, it could be a very effective replacement for the great, but ageing, SICP.

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I think if you're looking for a replacement for SICP that covers a broad spectrum of language paradigms, (in particular paradigms beyond just imperative vs. functional) a good choice might be Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming, which uses the Oz programming language.

Might be a bit ambitious covering Fortran, Lisp, C, Smalltalk, Scala, and more in an intro to programming course. This looks more like a history and comparison of languages.

To an extent, you're right. But SICP already covers most of the concepts of these languages -- it just chooses to cover them all in Scheme, with a functional bias. I don't see why differing syntax should affect the teaching of the concepts, as long as focus is maintained on one language when it comes to actual programming. That said, this course as it is does teach too broadly to be an effective intro to CS.

It is not just a difference in syntax, it is about the core. While all those programming languages are great in their respective areas, Scheme is directly based on the lambda calculus and as such it defines a minimal amount of primitives/constructions, on top of which you can build almost any other concept from scratch. This is great for a person learning the ropes.

There are plenty of good PL books. The main text for the course in question is Scott's "Programming Language Pragmatics", which is excellent.

We used Concepts of Programming Languages (http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/product/Concepts-of-...) in my undergraduate Comparative Languages course which was very good and seems to cover much of the same material as the course.

I sadly lost the book when I moved but I remember loving both the book and the course and learning a ton thanks to seeing a number of different language types side by side. I have fond memories of trying to wrap my mind around Prolog the first time I saw it.

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