"Programming Linguistics" examines a wide range of programming language designs, from Fortran to the newest research languages, to discover their common patterns, relationships, and antecedents. In studying the evolution of programming languages, the authors are also studying a series of answers to the central (and still unanswered) questions of what programs are and how they should be built.Programming Linguistics approaches language design as an attempt to define the nature of programming and the shape and structure of programs, rather than as the attempt to solve a series of narrow, disjoint technical problems. It emphasizes the structural-engineering rather than mathematical approach to programming, the importance of aesthetics and elegance in the success of language design, and provides an integrated treatment of concurrency and parallelism.Its readable and informal but rigorous coverage of the gamut of programming language designs is based on a simple and general programming model called the Ideal Software Machine. There are helpful exercises throughout.
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David Hillel Gelernter (born March 5, 1955) is an artist, writer, and professor of computer science at Yale University. He is a former national fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and senior fellow in Jewish thought at the Shalem Center, and sat on the National Endowment for the Arts. He publishes widely; his work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, LA Times, Weekly Standard, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and elsewhere. His paintings have been exhibited in New Haven and Manhattan.
He is known for contributions to parallel computation and for books on topics including computed worlds ("Mirror Worlds"), and what he sees as the destructive influence of liberal academia on American society, expressed most recently in his book America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats).
In 1993 he was sent a mail bomb in the post by Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, which almost killed him and left him with some permanent disabilities: he lost the use of his right hand and his right eye was permanently damaged.