Programming Language Concepts

What Hacker News says

1. fslothSep 2018
   "Expert F#" by Don Syme et. all. is a great starting point. It explains how to get started and contains lots of non-trivial code to type in and try out yourself. Don Syme designed F# as a no-nonsense industrial language and this book is a great introduction from that point of view.

   Then there is "Programming language Concepts" by Sestoft - which, while being a language book, at the same time exposes lot of beautiful patterns how to exactly use F# for data munching.

   Then, thirdly, Jon Harrop's "F# for scientist" is a great introduction for us that have a penchant foe writing numerical code (graphics or whatever). It's a great companion for the Expert F# as it shows how to use F# effectively in place of sonething like C++ or fortran.

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2. Seanny123Jul 2018
   I tried using this book to learn functional programming and Haskell. It didn't work for me, due to the learning curve and topic progression. I recommend instead reading "Programming Language Concepts" by Sestoft. It's F#, but it helped me understand the Haskell bits of this tutorial much better.
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3. fslothFeb 2015
   In this instance: Desktop, graphics. This from a hobby point of view, though! Which means I have very little time to achieve anything and occasionally don't touch the code in weeks. I've come to write code that is a) trifty b) readable c) works on compile d) leverages type system for composable code that has a specific "correct" way to do things.

   So I can return to my code, which I've completely forgotten how it works, see that it compiles, read it through, and continue working. Noticeably: I do not need to care about the tooling because it just works. I don't get a shiteload of weird exceptions when I run my code (looking at you, Clojure - yes, I'm a noob) and since the Pythonic and mutable nature of F# allows me to write code in the way I enjoy the most it feels like a glove. There are a few oddities occasionally and some bits are a bit more verbose than in other languages (Clojures collections spoil any other language) but the overall experience is that I can focus only on my code. For me, it's a pain free computational substrate, and free as in beer now that Visual Studio community edition is out.

   My progress is really slow but always worthwhile.

   If you are interested I found Jon Harrops "Visual F# 2010 for Technical Computing" really good practical introduction, Don Syme et. alls "Expert F#" a good reference book on writing general stuff in the .Net ecosystem with F#, Petricek's "Real-World Functional Programming" a very good introduction to various application patterns and Sestoft's "Programming Language Concepts" a great book and online reference on writing interpreters and compilers (http://www.itu.dk/people/sestoft/plc/).

   *At work I use C++ on MS stack.

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4. mavelikaraAug 2011
   I found Peter Sestoft's "Programming Language Concepts for Software Developers" an enjoyable read. The book incrementally builds two compilers - one for Micro-ML and one for Micro-C. The implementation language is F#.

   http://www.itu.dk/courses/BPRD/E2010/plcsd-0_50.pdf http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/martinesmann/Teaching-program...

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5. cygwin98Apr 2011
   As I've been working on my pet compiler project recently, I began to collect some compiler-related online resources, this book is one of the hidden gems. The author (Torben Mogensen) has been so generous to give it out for free, that's why I think it needs more exposure.

   It's heavy on the compiler theory part, so I mainly use it as a reference book. It also has a "companion" book (my take) -- Programming Language Concepts for Software Developers [1] by Peter Sestoft. The PLCSD book, also free, is more on hand-on projects, where you can implement a Micro-C compiler.

   [1] http://www.itu.dk/courses/BPRD/E2010/plcsd-0_50.pdf

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6. jarcaneMar 2016
   I have been working slowly through Sestoft's Programming Language Concepts, and through that I wrote a tiny interpreter in F# of a mini Forth-like language: http://ideone.com/24I5y0

   Inspired by this though, I decided I'd try re-writing it into a compiler for it instead, targeting the MicroMini VM[0], and here it is: http://ideone.com/czXhoM

   [0] https://github.com/jarcane/MicroMini

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