Programming Language Explorations

Programming Language Explorations is a tour of several modern programming languages in use today. The book teaches fundamental language concepts using a language-by-language approach. As each language is presented, the authors introduce new concepts as they appear, and revisit familiar ones, comparing their implementation with those from languages seen in prior chapters. The goal is to present and explain common theoretical concepts of language design and usage, illustrated in the context of practical language overviews.Twelve languages have been carefully chosen to illustrate a wide range of programming styles and paradigms. The book introduces each language with a common trio of example programs, and continues with a brief tour of its basic elements, type system, functional forms, scoping rules, concurrency patterns, and sometimes, metaprogramming facilities.Each language chapter ends with a summary, pointers to open source projects, references to materials for further study, and a collection of exercises, designed as further explorations. Following the twelve featured language chapters, the authors provide a brief tour of over two dozen additional languages, and a summary chapter bringing together many of the questions explored throughout the text.Targeted to both professionals and advanced college undergraduates looking to expand the range of languages and programming patterns they can apply in their work and studies, the book pays attention to modern programming practice, covers cutting-edge languages and patterns, and provides many runnable examples, all of which can be found in an online GitHub repository. The exploration style places this book between a tutorial and a reference, with a focus on the concepts and practices underlying programming language design and usage. Instructors looking for material to supplement a programming languages or software engineering course may find the approach unconventional, but hopefully, a lot more fun.

List of contents

IntroductionWHY STUDY PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE ELEMENTS EVALUATING PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES

JavaScript HELLO JAVASCRIPTTHE BASICSCLOSURES METHODSPROTOTYPESSCOPECALLBACKS AND PROMISESJAVASCRIPT WRAP UP

CoffeeScriptHELLO COFFEESCRIPTTHE BASICSNO SHADOWING?! COMPREHENSIONS DESTRUCTURING EXISTENTIAL OPERATORS COFFEESCRIPT WRAP UP

Lua HELLO LUA THE BASICSSCOPE TABLES METATABLES COROUTINES LUA WRAP UP

Python HELLO PYTHONTHE BASICS SCOPE PARAMETER ASSOCIATIONSPECIAL METHODS ITERATORS AND GENERATORS DECORATORS PYTHON WRAP UP

Ruby HELLO RUBY THE BASICS OBJECT ORIENTATION Messaging Encapsulation Inheritance Polymorphism Singleton Classes BLOCKS MIXINS ACCESS CONTROLMETAPROGRAMMINGRUBY WRAP UP

JuliaHELLO JULIA THE BASICS TYPES Abstract Types Parametric Types Sum and Product TypesType Annotations Covariance, Contravariance, and InvarianceMULTIPLE DISPATCH METAPROGRAMMING PARALLEL COMPUTINGJULIA WRAP UP

Java HELLO JAVA THE BASICS INTERFACES STATIC TYPING GENERICS THREADS METAPROGRAMMING JAVA WRAP UP

ClojureHELLO CLOJURE THE BASICS NAMESPACES PERSISTENT DATA STRUCTURES TRANSIENTS SOFTWARE TRANSACTIONAL MEMORY AGENTS THE EXPRESSION PROBLEM MACROSCLOJURE WRAP UP

Elm HELLO ELM THE BASICS TYPE INFERENCE TAGGED UNIONS RECORDSEFFECTSELM WRAP UP

ErlangHELLO ERLANG THE BASICS MATCHING MESSAGING ERLANG WRAP UP
Go HELLO GO THE BASICS POINTERS SLICES INTERFACESPANICS GOROUTINESREFLECTION GO WRAP UP

Swift HELLO SWIFTTHE BASICS OPTIONALSOPERATORS PROTOCOLSEXTENSIONS SAFETY FEATURES AUTOMATIC REFERENCE COUNTING SWIFT WRAP UP

Additional LanguagesTHE CLASSICS SYSTEMS LANGUAGES THE ENTERPRISE SCRIPTING THE ML FAMILY CONCURRENCY MATTERSTHE WEB CRYSTALLIZATIONS OF STYLE ESOTERIC LANGUAGES ASSEMBLY LANGUAGES

Afterword WHERE WE'VE BEEN Functions TypesExpressions Control Flow Concurrency Modularity Metaprogramming WHERE TO GO NEXT

Appendix A - Numbers INTEGERS FLOATING POINT NUMBERS RATIOS AND DECIMALS

Appendix B - Text CHARACTERS, GLYPHS, AND GRAPHEME CLUSTERS CHARACTER PROPERTIES CHARACTER ENCODING

About the author

Ray Toal is Professor of Computer Science at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles where he has been teaching since 1986. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1993 in semantics, with minors in theoretical computer science and database systems. His current research interests are in programming language design, compilers, APIs, and large scale infrastructure. He has consulted for a number of companies in the Los Angeles area, including Citysearch/CityGrid, Medaxis, Friendbuy, Handmade Mobile, M-GO, and Criteo. Ray has authored three books on programming languages and has been involved with projects at the Human Advancement Research Community (HARC).

Summary

Programming Language Explorations is a tour of several modern programming languages in use today. The book teaches fundamental language concepts using a language-by-language approach. As each language is presented, the authors introduce new concepts as they appear, and revisit familiar ones, comparing their implementation with those from languages seen in prior chapters. The goal is to present and explain common theoretical concepts of language design and usage, illustrated in the context of practical language overviews.

Twelve languages have been carefully chosen to illustrate a wide range of programming styles and paradigms. The book introduces each language with a common trio of example programs, and continues with a brief tour of its basic elements, type system, functional forms, scoping rules, concurrency patterns, and sometimes, metaprogramming facilities.

Each language chapter ends with a summary, pointers to open source projects, references to materials for further study, and a collection of exercises, designed as further explorations. Following the twelve featured language chapters, the authors provide a brief tour of over two dozen additional languages, and a summary chapter bringing together many of the questions explored throughout the text.

Targeted to both professionals and advanced college undergraduates looking to expand the range of languages and programming patterns they can apply in their work and studies, the book pays attention to modern programming practice, covers cutting-edge languages and patterns, and provides many runnable examples, all of which can be found in an online GitHub repository. The exploration style places this book between a tutorial and a reference, with a focus on the concepts and practices underlying programming language design and usage. Instructors looking for material to supplement a programming languages or software engineering course may find the approach unconventional, but hopefully, a lot more fun.

Additional text

"This book tackles the task of describing programming languages effectively and efficiently. The authors adopt a principle-based approach that allows readers to recognize how fundamental computer science concepts take form in each of the presented programming languages. This allows readers to experience how each language includes some subset of these concepts, and thus becomes suitable for different tasks. In this approach, functionality emerges as the embodiment of these fundamentals. Readers are then encouraged to find commonalities and themes in the material by following exercises, which also provide the means to further the study of any one of the presented languages. The final chapter links all of the material explicitly through a series of recurring themes of interest to software engineers and computer scientists. Although the book can be useful to any technical and academic audience, it will be better suited for upper-division undergraduate students, graduate students, or professionals seeking further development."—L. Benedicenti, Choice, May 2017

"All in all, this book makes for a great browse, an interesting read if one wishes to learn about different programming paradigms and languages, and a very clear and well-organized textbook. The language is crisp and concise, and assumes a familiarity with programming. I teach an upper-undergraduate module on the principles of programming languages, and plan to make use of this book extensively to help give students insights into the vast but interesting landscape of programming languages."—Sara Kalvala, ACM Computing Reviews, May 2017

Report

"This book tackles the task of describing programming languages effectively and efficiently. The authors adopt a principle-based approach that allows readers to recognize how fundamental computer science concepts take form in each of the presented programming languages. This allows readers to experience how each language includes some subset of these concepts, and thus becomes suitable for different tasks. In this approach, functionality emerges as the embodiment of these fundamentals. Readers are then encouraged to find commonalities and themes in the material by following exercises, which also provide the means to further the study of any one of the presented languages. The final chapter links all of the material explicitly through a series of recurring themes of interest to software engineers and computer scientists. Although the book can be useful to any technical and academic audience, it will be better suited for upper-division undergraduate students, graduate students, or professionals seeking further development."-L. Benedicenti, Choice, May 2017 "All in all, this book makes for a great browse, an interesting read if one wishes to learn about different programming paradigms and languages, and a very clear and well-organized textbook. The language is crisp and concise, and assumes a familiarity with programming. I teach an upper-undergraduate module on the principles of programming languages, and plan to make use of this book extensively to help give students insights into the vast but interesting landscape of programming languages."-Sara Kalvala, ACM Computing Reviews, May 2017

Product details

• Authors: Eileen Choe, Eileen (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) Choe, Choe Eileen, Choe Eileen, Rachel Rivera, Rachel (Pandora) Rivera, Rivera Rachel, Alexander Schneider, Alexander (Microsoft) Schneider, Schneider Alexander, Ray Toal, Ray Rivera Toal, Toal Ray
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 20.09.2016
• EAN: 9781498738460
• ISBN: 978-1-4987-3846-0
• No. of pages: 362
• Subjects: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > IT, data processing > Programming languages; COMPUTERS / Software Development & Engineering / General, COMPUTERS / Programming / General, Computer programming / software engineering, Computer Programming / Software Development