HPL: Little Languages and Tools

Rating:
Summary: What a God-awful mess!
Review: I'm giving this two stars because even in a random mess like this, some of the bits are of interest.

The first problem here is what a "handbook" should be -- a reference? Or a survey? If it's supposed to be at least somewhat of a survey, as I expect, I'd expect the classification/taxonomy/ontology to be good. But this volume is called "Little Languages and Tools". Well, Forth is a little language, LOGO is a little language, most assembler languages are very little languages, and some say Scheme is a little language -- and none of those are in here! If the editors were simply ontologically lazy, they should have admitted it and just called this volume "Misc/Other/Etc."

And what's a "tool"? I recall the introduction saying something about languages used for getting things done. Well, I'd hope most languages are for getting things done! If the editors wanted to express that a possible design goal of languages is making them concise and simple for the most common tasks that one anticipates them being put to, well, 1) good, I think so too, 2) they should have made this a /major/ point, not just an implicature, 3) they should have a good reason for segregating such languages into another volume.

The chapter on Perl is merely /excerpted/ from some other sparklingly mediocre book on Perl! Why bother?? For US$50, I don't want shovelware!

I'd have liked if this book surveyed non-programming computer languages -- i.e., markup languages. It seems to start to, with PIC, EQN, but then remembers what it's about, and then aborts that interesting topic.

The section on music languages is not bad, since there's been little or nothing in the way of surveys of music languages elsewhere. The design of music languages presents special challenges of interest to language designers as well as musicians, and this section at least covers some of them. Not worth the price for the rest of the book tho.

The only reason this book isn't a complete waste of money, brains, and talent, is that, despite everything, some of the details of the languages are interesting. However, you could probably be just as edified by thumbing thru documentation of these languages (man pages, tutorials, even just example code) that you could find free on the Net.

Rating:
Summary: What a God-awful mess!
Review: I'm giving this two stars because even in a random mess like this, some of the bits are of interest.

The first problem here is what a "handbook" should be -- a reference? Or a survey? If it's supposed to be at least somewhat of a survey, as I expect, I'd expect the classification/taxonomy/ontology to be good. But this volume is called "Little Languages and Tools". Well, Forth is a little language, LOGO is a little language, most assembler languages are very little languages, and some say Scheme is a little language -- and none of those are in here! If the editors were simply ontologically lazy, they should have admitted it and just called this volume "Misc/Other/Etc."

And what's a "tool"? I recall the introduction saying something about languages used for getting things done. Well, I'd hope most languages are for getting things done! If the editors wanted to express that a possible design goal of languages is making them concise and simple for the most common tasks that one anticipates them being put to, well, 1) good, I think so too, 2) they should have made this a /major/ point, not just an implicature, 3) they should have a good reason for segregating such languages into another volume.

The chapter on Perl is merely /excerpted/ from some other sparklingly mediocre book on Perl! Why bother?? For US$50, I don't want shovelware!

I'd have liked if this book surveyed non-programming computer languages -- i.e., markup languages. It seems to start to, with PIC, EQN, but then remembers what it's about, and then aborts that interesting topic.

The section on music languages is not bad, since there's been little or nothing in the way of surveys of music languages elsewhere. The design of music languages presents special challenges of interest to language designers as well as musicians, and this section at least covers some of them. Not worth the price for the rest of the book tho.

The only reason this book isn't a complete waste of money, brains, and talent, is that, despite everything, some of the details of the languages are interesting. However, you could probably be just as edified by thumbing thru documentation of these languages (man pages, tutorials, even just example code) that you could find free on the Net.