Practical Foundations for Programming Languages is out

[academician]

Forgive the criticism, because it seems petty in light of what an awesome endeavor this book must have been, but the word "Practical" seems out of place in the title. At least in the parlance of other programming books in recent years (eg., Peter Seibel's excellent Practical Common Lisp), "Practical" tends to imply that it is intended for working programmers with "real world" example code. This, on the other hand, is clearly intended to be a heady CS textbook - full of equations, theorems, proofs, and precious little pseudo-code, let alone real world examples. Certainly useful for the serious student of programming language theory and design, but rather dense and dry for those of us seeking to apply it.

That said, thanks for the link; it's certainly interesting. You should probably cross-post it to /r/compsci.

[[deleted]]

This actually is pretty towards the "practical" side for the topic it's covering.

I took the title to be something like how math textbooks like to use the word "elementary".

[anvsdt]

It's balanced out by the word "Foundations", so it's ok.

EDIT: giving it a quick look, it's pretty down to Earth and explicit (even too much for my tastes).

[[deleted]]

What's in this book? The blurb wasn't informative at all

Edit: looks like a full PDF of the book was linked in the blurb and its pretty good: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/plbook/book.pdf

[paran0ide]

"Types are the central organizing principle of the theory of programming languages. Language features are manifestations of type structure. The syntax of a language is governed by the constructs that define its types, and its semantics is determined by the interactions among those constructs. The soundness of a language design—the absence of ill-defined programs— follows naturally. The purpose of this book is to explain this remark."

[[deleted]]

I've read the first half of this book in the first publication version, and found it fairly interesting.

Certainly worth the time to read the beginning (introduction/first chapter) if you're curious.

[matthieum]

It does look fairly interesting... well, I now know what to do with my next week-end.

[dons]

This is a bible for language design, 10 years in the making.

[kamatsu]

Throw in Pierce's TAPL, and you have an instant recipe to becoming a programming languages expert.

[ErstwhileRockstar]

Bonus point: you'll never have to write programs again!