Practical Foundations for Programming Languages | Hacker News Reader

Practical Foundations for Programming Languages

amazon.com

47 pointsjmount11 comments

Free draft: 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.)

Thanks!

> 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.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html

It's CC licensed, so anyone can distribute a copy. It doesn't matter if the author takes it down.

Oops, I missed that. Thanks for the correction.

I 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!

590 pages in 1.66 MB, that's already a reliable indicator for an intense reading experience...

Looks 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?

The 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/

Here's a recent HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4380900

He is one of the major experts on type systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Harper_(computer_scienti...

Price: $72.81 Wonder how much Harper gets from that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com