If you are passionate about programming and and computer science, this is the book to read. It's like Euclid's elements, but for programming.
Euclid's Elements is absolutely not a useful book for the contemporary.
Elements of Programming (2009)
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Re: Elements of Programming (2009)
#12If you are passionate about programming and and computer science, this is the book to read. It's like Euclid's elements, but for programming.
Euclid's Elements is absolutely not a useful book for the contemporary.
I've found it useful as a grounding, and reference, and authoritative definition source, so I refer to:
https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...
when writing:
Re: Elements of Programming (2009)
#13I've found this book, and Stepanov's previous work, to be among the most insightful ways of thinking about programming. But it's hard to distill, and we could wish for a much better language than C++ to express these ideas in.
That is the attractiveness of the dark side of the force, the closest we have come from all kinds of Haskell like exploration ideas into a mainstream language, maybe one day Rust will get there as well. No accident that Bartosz Milewski got to mix both worlds. Agree it should be better.
Stepanov is addressing a lot of topics that Haskell sweeps under the rug. For software for which crashing is acceptable behavior, such as compilers, web browsers, or theorem provers, that's an improvement. Not all software falls in that category.
Re: Elements of Programming (2009)
#14If you are passionate about programming and and computer science, this is the book to read. It's like Euclid's elements, but for programming.
Euclid's Elements is absolutely not a useful book for the contemporary.
You missed the point. Euclid's elements is a beautiful work that is incredibly well structured. It has served an important purpose in math. Elements of programming is like Euclid's elements in this way.