[PD] [OT] cool book (maybe relevant to list discussion)

Andy Farnell padawan12 at obiwannabe.co.uk
Sat Sep 10 21:48:27 CEST 2011


> But we are trained to deduce unreasonable expectations from 
> terse book titles and then blame that on the publishers.

I'm glad Peter posted the Norvig article and guess the 'ars 
longa, vita brevis' theme is there in Tate's book title in a 
cheeky way. 

Of the languages I've encountered, maybe over 20 if
allowing things like bash and assembly, most I haven't 
used in years. They were formative. Or they were trendy. The 
most "practical" language for me has that word in its acronym 
expansion. I once learned a functional language called ML, just
to teach it, because someone had decided it should be on a
syllabus. I suspect we may agree well on the value of such 
academic trajectories Mathieu, however I was interested to see 
in the Woodman book you mentioned;
"From ML to C via Modula-3: an approach to teaching programming"
which seems like a torturous path to put students through. Anyway, 
Tate wants to urge this empirical pluralism, that learning languages
is good for you whether you use them or not, for purely
self-developmental reasons. 



-- 
Andy Farnell <padawan12 at obiwannabe.co.uk>



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