Software Engineering discussion

I am excited to dig into this book. Thanks, Steph, for bringing it to our attention!

Even more important than providing specific language introductions, this book teaches broad language concepts. Note that this book contains a lot of info distilled into few pages. It must be read more like a math book than a novel. I think that doing the programming exercises is essential for learning, and they force one to dig into the language more deeply than the text describes.

I thought it might be useful to see what our group background is for these languages, so cut and past and modify this if you would like to share your background with us:

Ruby: Heard of it, never programmed in it
Io: Never heard of it
Prolog: Wrote a few toy programs in the distant past
Scala: Heard of it, never programmed in it
Erlang: Heard of it, never programmed in it
Closure: Heard of it, never programmed in it
Haskell: Wrote a few toy programs recently

BTW, the publisher has a discussion forum for this book at

http://forums.pragprog.com/forums/147

And, a great blog with solutions (but don't peek until after you have finished your homework)!

http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2109-Sev...

I like the 5 questions that he asks on page 18.

What is the typing model?
What is the programming model?
How will you interact with it?
What are the decision constructs and core data structures?
What are the core features that make the language unique?

I introduce a lot of web languages in my class and have used a similar set of questions in order to talk about the "spirit" of a development environment. I think this is a good basis of questions to ask.

This book reminds me of a programming paradigm class I took in my undergrad program at the U covering various paradigms. So far Ruby looks pretty cool and pretty strait forward. I need to work through the problems at the end of the chapter

Ruby: Never heard of it.
Io: Never heard of it.
Prolog: Heard of it, never programmed in it.
Scala: Never Heard of it
Erlang: Never Heard of it.
Closure: Never Heard of it.
Haskell: Heard of it, never programmed in it.

Introduction sounds very promising - I hope to get enough information to have a clear understanding of differences between programming paradigms besides procedural and object-oriented. Also, I’m curious about purpose and design of languages selected in this book.

I may have heard about some of the languages, but I put “never heard” if I can’t recollect any information about it.

Ruby: Heard of Ruby on Rails, not sure about their relationship yet
Io: Never heard of it
Prolog: Never heard of it
Scala: Never heard of it
Erlang: Never heard of it
Clojure: Never heard of it
Haskell: Heard of it

Totally missed the poll. :P

Ruby: Heard of it, teach it in the SEIS752 class, don't use it extensively
Io: Never heard of it
Prolog: Heard of it, never programmed in it
Scala: Heard of it, never programmed in it
Erlang: Heard of it, never programmed in it
Closure: Heard of it, never programmed in it
Haskell: Heard of it, never programmed in it

Ruby: Used for Rails in SEIS752 and elsewhere, plus rewrote a toy database utility a while back
Io: Never heard of it
Prolog: Never heard of it
Scala: Heard of it, never programmed in it
Erlang: Heard of it, never programmed in it
Closure: Heard of it, never programmed in it
Haskell: Heard of it, never programmed in it

Though on reflection, most of my "heard of its" may be based on having owned this book for a while but not having read it yet.

The narrative in this book seems quite personable. I know very little about these languages, so I expect to learn a lot. Although, I would be surprised if I ever use more than one or two of these languages at work.

This book just received a Jolt Best Book award.

http://drdobbs.com/joltawards/2315000...