Re: book

[Don Blaheta <address@hidden>]

Quoth Paul Graham:
> It occurs to me that someone should edit a book about
> all the new languages.  There are now a substantial number
> of programmers who are open to new languages, and it
> would be convenient if there were a book where they
> could see a lot of them side by side; one chapter each,
> a little philosophy and a lot of examples.  It would not
> even be much work for most of the contributors, because
> they could reuse stuff from the existing books.  

Sounds nice, but (especially with the "a lot of examples" part) a lot of
non-PL folks will judge each language based only on which syntax looks
nicest---or more likely, which syntax best balances "what I'm used to"
with novelty.  :P  Which is not to say that such a book wouldn't be
good, just that most people wouldn't use it in the right way.

Also, when you say "new languages", what do you mean?  After all, Scheme
would be "new" to a lot of the target audience in spite of having been
around since before many (most?) of them were born. :)  For that matter,
Perl might be new to some of them, and in any case it'd be nice to have
it in there as a point of comparison.  (Heck, C++ might be good to have
as a point of comparison....)

-- 
-=-Don Blaheta-=-=-dpb@cs.brown.edu-=-=-<http://www.cs.brown.edu/~dpb/>-=-
"I would argue that most Americans could tell you that Washington state
(or at least, the city of Seattle) is in the Pacific Northwest.  I would
not necessarily expect them to be able to find any of the following
things on a map or a globe, however: 1) Washington state, 2) Seattle, 3)
the Pacific, 4) north or 5) west."			--Chris Sedlack