On Sat, 10 Sep 2011, Andy Farnell wrote:
Just wondering if there was anything in that book you thought was cool. It struck me as a nice idea to compare a bunch of languages.
As a non-buyer, I only have access to two chapters, so, I can't comment on that book.
But I have read other similar books in the past. While I tried to study at UQÀH, I borrowed from the library the books that hardly anyone would borrow, such as Raphael A Finkel's Advanced Programming Language Design (1996), which was very new back then, and a bunch of other ones whose titles I don't remember.
I eventually bought Woodman's Programming Language Choice, but it was less interesting, as much of the focus was on teaching introductory courses, and much of the book is occupied by N persons each presenting their favourite kind of Pascal/Modula/Ada clone. I quickly found it dubious that persistency would be touted as a programming language feature, rather than the base concepts that would make persistency a kind of pluggable library. I could sense that it was a buzzword of that time (1996).
Then after that, it's only on the web that I learned about programming languages. That's how I learned about Ruby. Then I gradually stopped paying attention.
I encountered Pd for reasons somewhat unrelated.
BTW, the first study about programming language comparison happened around 1969-1972. It indexed several thousand programming languages that were already existing at that time, yet no language that we now use existed back then.
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC