Required Reading: The Role of the Study of Programming Languages...

Via the always excellent Patrick Logan -- Daniel Friedman: The Role of the Study of Programming Languages in the Education of a Programmer.

Some key quotes:

• On the lack of tail call support in Java:

  Guy Steele...was promised back in 1997 that this flaw would be fixed. Here it is 2001 and there is still no resolution of this problem on the horizon.

  Emphasis mine. The more things change...


• On Friedman's own background and educational goals:

  Later, I wanted to be able to implement a language per week.

  Followed later by:

  I want the student to be able to implement (perhaps crudely) every language that they study...

  Now that's Thinking Different.


• Friedman quoting Jonathan Sobel, a former student who successfully used (uses?) these concepts in practice:

  Efficiency comes from elegant solutions, not optimized programs. Optimization is just a few correctness-preserving transformations away.



• Finally, and perhaps my favorite, Patrick Logan's cogent take:

  Probably programming in C itself (or Java or Scala) is a kind of premature optimization.

WARNING: Refers to -- and poses some examples in -- the lambda calculus. Implementations in Scheme. Don't let either of those put you off, though. I don't understand every line of code (yet), but I've seen enough to be inspired to figure it out.

Challenge yourself.