Re: A database theory resource - ideas

On Mar 17, 5:09 am, Bob Badour <bbad..._at_pei.sympatico.ca> wrote:
> On the programming side of things, one can look for names like Sipser,
> Knuth, Dijkstra, Plauger, Cargill, Stroustrop, Maguire, Ullman again,
> Aho, Ritchie, Kernighan, a bunch more from both Bell Labs and Xerox
> PARC. While things are much better on the programming side, the signal
> to noise ratio is still abysmal.
>

Kernighan ??? Ritchie ????? That pair are immediately barred for between them producing an abomination above/beneath all others and then daring to write an utterly godforsaken book about it ("The C Programming Language") and setting us all back untold years.

And in the same breath as genuine giants like Knuth and Dijkstra too.

Wirth's journal articles plot an interesting path through from Algol-65/Algol-W through Pascal. Modula, Modula-2 to Oberon and Oberon-2. They include some interesting examples of pragmatics dressed as principles too ;)

On the FP side, Simon Peyton Jones and Philip Wadler are usually well worth a read. The only time XML ever gave me pause for concern was when Wadler got involved, because if anyone could wrangle something useful from that mess it would have been him. Bruce MacLennan's book on Principles of Programming Languages is a nice easy but informative read too. DA Schmidt's book on Denotational Semantics is excellent too, and is available online as a download, as is Simon Peyton Jones's book on Implementation of Functional Programming Languages. Lloyd Allison's introduction to denotational semantics is short, to the point and a galloping good read through the subject. Received on Sat Mar 17 2007 - 23:51:49 CET