books-programmingLanguages-programmingLanguagesContents

Please note that these are only notes towards a book that will probably never be finished. Perhaps these notes will make interesting reading in the meantime. -- bayle

Programming Languages: a survey

Contents

• Preface and Introduction
• Part I: The design of programming languages
  • Chapter 1: Dynamics of design and adoption
  • Chapter 2: History and families
  • Chapter 3: Design criteria
  • Part 1 notes and todos
• Part II: A catalog of general-purpose programming languages
  • Chapter 4: Favorites
  • Chapter 5: Imperative, memory-managed, OOP languages
  • Chapter 6: Close-to-the-metal
  • Chapter 7: The Lisp family
  • Chapter 8: Functional
  • Chapter 9: Other paradigms
  • Chapter 10: Misc
  • Chapter 11: Of historical interest
  • Chapter 12: Minimalistic or easy-to-learn
  • Chapter 13: Hardware description
  • Chapter 15: Esoteric
  • Part 2 notes and todos
• Part III: A catalog of subturing programming languages, and languages that compete with them
  • Chapter 16: Query
  • Chapter 17: Documents and markup
  • Chapter 18: Styling
  • Chapter 19: Data
  • Chapter 20: Transform
  • Chapter 21: Templating
  • Chapter 22: Proof assistant
  • Chapter 23: Pre-processor
  • Chapter 24: Restricted general-purpose
  • Chapter 25: Misc
• Part IV: A catalog of target languages
  • Chapter 26: intermediate target languages
  • Chapter 27: Assembly language principals
  • Chapter 27: Assembly language frequently used instructions
  • Chapter 27: The ARM ISA
  • Chapter 27: The x86 ISA
  • Chapter 27: The MIPS and DLX ISAs
  • Chapter 27: The PDP-8 and PDP-11 ISAs
  • Chapter 27: The PIC and AVR MCU ISAs
  • Chapter 27: The MSP430 MCU ISA
  • Chapter 27: Soft core ISA
  • Chapter 27: Parallax Propeller multicore MCU ISA and SPIN bytecode
  • Chapter 27: ISA comparisons
  • Chapter 27: Other CPU Instruction Set Architectures
  • Chapter 28: Graphics co-processor (GPGPU)
• Part V: A catalog of programming language constructs and features
  • contains: data, OOP, extensible data, evaluation strategy (call-bys), operations, extensible operations, modules and encapsulation, linked data, managing state, managing state: scoping, team programming, misc, runtime features, std lib, interop,
  • Chapter 24: Syntax
  • Chapter ?: Control
  • Chapter ?: Error handling
  • Chapter ?: Type
  • Chapter ?: Numbers
  • Chapter ?: Strings
  • Chapter ?: Metaprogramming
    • contains: hacking the call stack, hacking the ENV, operations, hacking classes, syntax, macros etc, eval (todo generalize), misc
  • Chapter ?: Low level
  • Chapter ?: Alternative paradigms motivated by physics
  • Chapter ?: Misc constructs
  • Chapter ?: Other features
• Part VI: A catalog of constructs and features relating to concurrency and distributed computing
• Part VII: Usage patterns, idioms, and best practices
  • contains: patterns, types of coding tasks
• Part VII: Formal theoretical stuff
  • Chapter ?: CS theory 101
  • Chapter ?: Models of computation (Turing-equivalent systems) (also, models of concurrent computation)
  • Chapter ?: Sub-Turing models of computation
  • Chapter ?: Halting
  • Chapter ?: Semantics
• Part IX: Type systems
• Part X: Implementation
  • contains: the general pipeline, modularity, concurrency implementation, efficiency, Normal forms, Performance optimizations, etc
  • Chapter ?: Parsing (and lexing)
  • Chapter ?: targets, IRs, VMs and runtimes
  • Chapter ?: Interop
  • Chapter ?: Hard things to make it easy for the programmer (contains: garbage collection, greenthreads, TCO and strictness analysis)
  • Chapter ?: Tradeoffs
    • contains: Constraints that performance considerations of the language and the toolchain impose on language design
• Part XI: Random thoughts and ideas for the future of programming languages
• Part XII: Links and external resources

todo

todo add in stuff from [1] and [2] and [3] and [4] and [5] and any non-opinions from [6].