Last fall it became clear to me that it was “now or never” time for completing Practical Foundations for Programming Languages, so I put just about everything else aside and made the big push to completion. The copy editing phase is now complete, the cover design (by Scott Draves) is finished, and its now in the final stages of publication. You can even pre-order a copy on Amazon; it’s expected to be out in November.

I can already think of ways to improve it, but at some point I had to declare victory and save some powder for future editions. My goal in writing the book is to organize as wide a body of material as I could manage in a single unifying framework based on structural operational semantics and structural type systems. At over 600 pages the manuscript is at the upper limit of what one can reasonably consider a single book, even though I strived for concision throughout.

Quite a lot of the technical development does not follow along traditional lines. For example, I completely decouple the concepts of assignment, reference, and storage class (heap or stack) from one another, which makes clear that one may have references to stack-allocated assignables, or make use of heap-allocated assignables without having references to them. As another example, my treatment of concurrency, while grounded in the process calculus tradition, coheres with my treatment of assignables, but differs sharply from standard accounts (and avoids some of the complications in the treatment of process equivalences).

An explicit goal was to avoid the computational cladistics that characterizes many treatments of PL concepts. For example, there are not chapters on “paradigms” such as “functional programming” or “object-oriented programming”, although many of their underlying concepts are treated in the text. So there are chapters on higher-order functions and dynamic dispatch, for example, but these are not elevated to language design principles, but rather are analyses of computational phenomena “found in nature”.

With the first edition behind me, I intend to resume blogging. I have a few topics lined up in my head, including an update on our new undergraduate curriculum at Carnegie Mellon (going smashingly), and more posts on fundamentals of logic and PL’s. So stay tuned!

Update: word-smithing.

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