Programming Languages

The Early History of Smalltalk

Alan C. Kay

Recounts Smalltalk's design, arguing objects sending messages to each other, not classes or inheritance, was the idea that actually mattered.

A Tutorial Introduction to the Lambda Calculus

Raul Rojas

Works through lambda calculus as a minimal formal system in which functions alone encode numbers, booleans and recursion, and where computation is just substitution.

MIT 6.100L Introduction to CS and Programming using Python

Ana Bell (MIT OpenCourseWare)

Teaches programming as computational problem-solving rather than syntax, introducing complexity and abstraction early enough that they shape how the beginner writes code.

Go To Statement Considered Harmful

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Unrestricted jumps destroy the correspondence between program text and program execution, which is what makes reasoning possible.

Assumes having written a loop and lost track of where control went; three pages, no mathematics

Why Functional Programming Matters

John Hughes

Argues that laziness and higher-order functions are what make functional programs more modular, not the absence of assignment, using infinite lists and function combinators as evidence.

Uniprocessor Garbage Collection Techniques

Paul R. Wilson

Surveys mark-sweep, copying and reference-counting collectors and argues the real design axis is not which algorithm but whether it moves objects and when it runs.

The Birth of Prolog

Alain Colmerauer & Philippe Roussel

Recounts how Prolog grew out of an attempt to make Robinson's resolution principle into a usable natural-language question-answering system, and why its control rule became depth-first.

Domain-Specific Languages: An Annotated Bibliography

Arie van Deursen, Paul Klint & Joost Visser

Surveys decades of work on languages built for one problem domain, arguing the recurring trade-off is expressiveness for that domain against the cost of building and maintaining it.

Static Typing Where Possible, Dynamic Typing When Needed: The End of the Cold War Between Programming Languages

Erik Meijer & Peter Drayton

Argues the static-versus-dynamic typing debate is a false choice, because real languages gain from static checking wherever a type is known and from dynamic dispatch wherever it is not yet.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Abelson, Sussman & Sussman

Programs are built from abstraction barriers, and the language you build is more important than the one you were given.

Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages

Christopher Strachey

Introduces the vocabulary of L-values versus R-values, and of a language's meaning as a mathematical function from programs to values, that later semantics work built on.

Programming with Abstract Data Types

Barbara Liskov & Stephen Zilles

Argues a language should let a programmer define new types whose representation is hidden, so a data structure's implementation can change without touching the code that uses it.