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Introduction to programming languages
Bansal A., Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, FL, 2013. 624 pp. Type: Book (978-1-466565-14-2)
Date Reviewed: Nov 7 2014

The programming language landscape continues to evolve rather quickly. It is not just that new languages are created, but also that new ideas get incorporated as fundamental concepts in these languages. So even though there is a plethora of survey books on programming languages, ranging from the excellent [1], to the passable [2], to the dreadful [3], there is room for more. A quick comparison of the table of contents of this book and comparable books shows some overlap, but also quite a few novel chapters in Bansal’s work.

In fact, the range of topics is phenomenal. From low-level concerns (hardware) to high-level ideas (such as parametric polymorphism), the scale is enormous. And, of course, not only are the usual suspects here (imperative, object-oriented, functional, and logic), but new ones are presented, namely, concurrent, visual, multimedia, web-based, and event-based.

And there we already see some of the flaws of this book starting to show through. For example, there is an over-enthusiasm for labeling something a paradigm: having a language that is about multimedia does not make it a new paradigm. Paradigms are fundamental ideas of how to structure programs that reach deep into the language itself. Web-based programming does involve software architecture ideas, but it does not actually involve a language paradigm shift. Another is an over-reliance on low-level concerns (centered around machine hardware and efficiency) to explain many concepts in programming languages. The scope of the book is large, so its explanations of many ideas are over-simplified. Just as annoying is the complete lack of in-text references to standard sources for much of the material. The explanations use close-to-formal language, which could lend the text extra authority, but instead disguise many infelicities as the theory of programming languages.

This is a valiant attempt at writing a good textbook with enormous scope. It is well structured, and all chapters come with summaries, assessments, and further reading sections. Many chapters include case studies, and good use is made of appendices to collect useful and otherwise hard-to-find information. And while what is written is at times misleading, someone who already knows the material can “see through” this and understand the pragmatism of such an explanation; unfortunately, the audience for this book may end up believing that it now possesses deep and accurate knowledge of programming languages, while what it actually gets is knowledge that is “good enough for most situations.” If there were clear signposts throughout the book itself, this pragmatic approach might become a welcome feature of the book rather than a constant distraction.

Basically, by trying to cover so much in so few pages, and in attempting to be almost formal, the result is a bit of a monster. This book could have been an excellent survey (by dropping some topics and being more honest about the fact that this is a survey). To write a solid textbook with the material given here, about triple the number of pages would have been needed. Either of those books (a survey or a textbook) would have been useful, but this hybrid book ends up being unsatisfying.

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Reviewer:  Jacques Carette Review #: CR142910 (1502-0111)
1) Tucker, A.; Noonan, R. Programming languages: principles and paradigms. McGraw-Hill, Dubuque, IA, 2002.
2) Sebesta, R. W. Concepts of programming languages. Addison-Wesley, Boston, MA, 2012.
3) Clark, R. G. Comparative programming languages. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 2000.
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