I did not see this coming. I was in a Barnes and Noble book store the other day and a new book jumped off the shelf into my hands. (I was shopping for gifts, honestly. I don't know what drew me over to the computer section.)
The relationship between Lisp and logic programming goes back to the 1960's and was a precursor to Scheme being invented in the first place. Steele created Scheme as a vehicle to understand Carl Hewitt's actor language which was derived from his Planner language which Hewitt developed about the same time as Alain Colmerauer was developing Prolog. Planner implemented a backtracking capability (for planning, get it?) similar to Prolog's. Scheme has since been used to implement many kinds of programming languages, including several kinds of Planner-like and Prolog-like languages.
And so The Reasoned Schemer brings it all back home to the student of programming and programming languages. It follows the Q&A-with-food-themes style of books also written by Dan Friedman with various authors for learning Lisp and Scheme themselves. (They even have a Java book in this style.) Some people like the style, others do not.
Programmers interested in Lisp, Scheme, functional programming, and/or logic programming will be interested in this book.
2 comments:
See "Middle History of Logic Programming: Resolution, Planner, Prolog and the Japanese Fifth Generation Project"
http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.3036
Also see
ActorScript: Industrial strength integration of local and nonlocal concurrency for Client-cloud Computing
http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.3330
Post a Comment