(Part 2) Top products from r/ProgrammingLanguages

Yeah there was nothing in the talk about it.

As far as I can tell, it's a somewhat silly reference to the fact that the influential book "Modern C++ Design" was written in the C++ 98 era.

This 2001 book advocated a clean break from the C heritage in C++:

https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Design-Generic-Programming-Patterns/dp/0201704315

It's heavy on template metaprogramming. I actually prefer "C with classes" for many problems, but it's it's clear that C++11, 14, 17 are going further in this direction.

And I believe that Immer relies on many features from C++11 and 14. Those features enable C++ the language to delegate all its data structures to libraries, rather than being part of the language.

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For a completely different and more useful application of the word "postmodern" in programming, I recommend this paper:

http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/comp/Publications/CS-TR-02-9.abs.html

It's very insightful, fun, and in the 15 years since it was written has become more relevant. I haven't blogged about this, but this kind of thinking underlies the shell and the design of the Oil shell in particular. In particular, in large systems, there is "no grand narrative", and it makes sense to opportunistically use models when they are useful, but throw them out when they are not.

There is a tendency among programming language designers to assume that they are at the center of the universe. A big part of shell is about making existing pieces written in different languages work together.

And that includes the operating system. To me, it's obvious that runtime is more important compile time, and too many programming languages are ignorant of the other enormous piece of code that runs when your program runs -- the operating system.

Here's my attempt to be helpful!

• Borrow or buy Simon Peyton Jones' The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages (Amazon, free PDF version).
  
• Also read Implementing functional languages: a tutorial, which is a reimagining of the above for use in the classroom.
  
• Read through The ZINC Experiment, Xavier Leroy's exposition of his earliest OCaml implementation.
  
• I really like the LLVM Kaleidoscope tutorial series. It's not about compiling functional languages. Rather, it implements a compiler in OCaml.
  
• I second u/sociopath_in_me's advice to try to tackle Crafting Interpreters again.
  
• Check out The Optimal Implementation of Functional Programming Languages by Andrea Asperti and Stefano Guerrini (Amazon). There are PDFs of it all over the internet, but I don't know what its copyright status is.
  
  Regarding Asperti and Guerrini, there are a few people on this subreddit who are working on cutting edge research compilers for functional languages based on term-rewriting. I've found this subreddit as well as r/Compilers to be very friendly and helpful in general, so I encourage you to take advantage of them. Ask questions, bounce ideas off of people, etc.

I would say go with whatever your computer uses so that you can follow along (unless your computer uses something really obsucre).

As for books, I can only really recommend the places I learned X86 from which would be Hacking: the art of exploitation since it puts assembly the context you'll find it most often (looking through assembled code) so you learn many useful tools along the way. Also the textbook I had in college (you can find it cheaper if you look around) which covers many other topics too relating to computer memory and whatnot.

Though for just learning some basic assembly, look for some simple resources online. It's not too hard to learn generally speaking so you should be fine.

You might also be interested in Sebesta's Concepts of Programming Languages.

Book: Principles of Programming Languages: Design, Evaluation, and Implementation

It's a reskinned second edition: www.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques-International-Economy/dp/9332518661

And there's even a GREEN dragon book from 1977: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201000229

Foundations for Programming Languages by John C. Mitchell

I worked on the Windows operating system and Internet Explorer at various points in my career. With very large projects like those, even normally trivial problems become significant engineering tasks when doing so at those scales. Just compiling the core library of IE (allocators, text handling, dom, etc) could take half an hour, so you really came to appreciate incremental builds.

To get a sense of the scale of such problems, I might recommend the book Large Scale C++ Design. I remember finding the book very dry, but in the author's defense, it's a very dry problem space.