Question

Javascript: The Good Parts is a great book. Often I find myself reading passages like the following from the perspective of a language designer:

undefined and NaN are not constants. They are global variables, and you can change their values. This should not be possible, and yet it is. Don’t do it.

Takeaways:

1. Don’t change the value of undefined in my Javascript code.
2. When designing a language, make its equivalent of undefined immutable.

A different more subtle example would be ‘for in shouldn’t enumerate over prototype properties’.

I want a book at talks about these issues of language design outside of the context of a particular language.

If you were trying to design the ‘perfect’ OO language, what books would you read for guidance?

Answer 1

The web site ‘lambda the ultimate’ is very much about programming languages, and they occasionally have some good resources, although they tend to be more interested in academic kinds of things. Functional programming is big there, for instance.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/papers

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/492