[plt-scheme] One eyed man leads blind

On Dec 10, 2009, at 5:09 PM, wooks wrote:

> So it looks like I'll be teaching a course in Programming Paradigms
> next term/semester. I never actually took a course in the subject
> myself and have varying degrees of familiarity with the main
> paradigms. Life is going to get very interesting.
> 
> There are a number of recommended texts none of which I am familiar
> with, one of which is Mitchell's Concepts of Programming Languages.
> 
> http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Programming-Languages-John-Mitchell/dp/0521780985/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260482563&sr=8-1

I don't know this one.

You might take a look at <a href="http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html">van Roy and Haridi</a>, about which I've heard good things (although I haven't used it in a class myself).  In particular, van Roy and Haridi don't believe there is such a thing as a "programming paradigm", only features that various languages provide or don't (an opinion that people on this list have also expressed).  To prove this, they do everything in the language Oz, which allegedly provides all the features necessary to do procedural, OO, functional, logical/declarative, concurrent, multi-agent, etc. programming, tightly integrated so you don't think of your programming as being in any one particular "paradigm".  Implementations of Oz are available for free download (look for Mozart).

And, as mentioned previously, there's always PLAI.  I'm in the middle of a two-semester sequence on programming languages right now: I used a few chapters of PLAI in the first semester, and plan to get through most of the rest of the book in the second semester.

Steve Bloch