Concepts in Programming Languages

Rating:
Summary: sucks
Review: Hi, I'm also taking CS242 with John Mitchell, and while I read a review on Mitchell's website calling his book an "inspiration," I've found it to be puke-inducing. He uses a language which nobody cares about -- ML -- for most of his examples, and doesn't do a clear enough job explaining how ML works. As for the class, it too sucks.

Rating:
Summary: Yes it sucked!
Review: I too took the class with John Mitchell in Stanford a few years back. The manuscript, which now is this book, was very poorly written, erroneous, inconsitent and not even complete! It's one of the worst classes I've taken in the Stanford CS department (most of the CS classes were really rigorous and well taught. Although to be fair, some professors in some other departments were even worse than John Mitchell). I believe I could've benefited more from the class had he put students' interest first by choosing a better textbook.

I don't know why he put so much empathsis on ML..maybe that's one of the languages he used most during his Ph.D.? But nobody uses it anymore, so what's the point?

Someone in the class at that time suggested having a chapter on scripting languages such as Perl (Python is pretty interesting too). That would be more useful. But apparently he didn't consider it.

I would not buy this book unless you have no choice but to help the professor get rich.

Rating:
Summary: great book, the best presentation of the topic
Review: The book is wonderfully and clearly written; it is an easy read without taking a college course, which is what I did. Any person seriously interested in computer science should get acquainted with this material to develop true understanding and appreciation for programming languages in general and specific ones in popular use right now. Introduction of other languages, like Lisp, ML, and Smalltalk is very appropriate and sets a good background for the foundation and comparison of popular aspects of C++ and Java.

Rating:
Summary: Missing the point
Review: While I cannot speak to the quality of Mitchell's course, having only read his book, the earlier criticisms of his use of ML in the book are missing the point of a programming languages class. It's not meant to teach you a random sampling of the 2500+ computer languages that are out there. The idea is to learn about the fundamental paradigms of programming, with a focus on the functional and logical approaches since students are generally already familiar with imperative and object-oriented programming.

ML is one of several good choices for illustrating functional programming, and is actually one of the more popular functional languages (especially the OCaML dialect.) There are many well written books and tutorials on the ML family of languages freely available on the web if you need more examples or detail than he provides in this text. However, the point isn't to learn ML, but rather that once you understand functional programming in any language, you can take advantage of its power, not only in languages like perl and python which offer some limited but nice functional features like map and anonymous functions, but also in imperative languages like C via function pointers and callback techniques.