| ▲ | rtpg 6 hours ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> This included what was probably the most interesting part, writing the tricky recursive code to implement the match statement. Back in school I found this book[0], "The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages". Flipping through it was very neat because it kinda demystified the nuts and bolts of implementing the "fancier" functional programming features for me. Chapter 5 is about implementing pattern matching. You read this kind of stuff and realize how easy things become when you just tackle a problem with the right mindset and abstractions. And this is a book from 1987! We've always had decent answers for a lot of the stuff. I think it's interesting to flip through if you're a language implementer, though helps to be comfortable with reading some stuff sideways and not understanding every detail. [0] https://simon.peytonjones.org/assets/pdfs/slpj-book-1987-sea... | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | jan_m_savage 3 hours ago | parent [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
A lot of the better books in every domain have been written in the Golden age of the modern world, i.e. 1950-1988. As soon as the 90's entered, quality started to worsen. At around the same time, porn began making inroads into the world. I know some porn-loving midwit will downvote this answer, but the more I look for signs of human degradation, the more I find porn as the main culprit. I say this because some decades ago, I had a neighbor who was a cheerful, enthusiastic and can-do-attitude fella, who would grow all sorts of flowers, fruits in his patch of land, and there were also some fruit trees he had planted. He wasn't into reading and this was his main pastime, this and chatting with others, and going on long walks. A few years later his son got him a mobile phone and a large TV. His son would often tell me how he'd quarrel with his dad because he would stay up watching female wrestling. After a while, I suspect he also discovered porn. Some years later, I went back home and visited them. The garden had been abandoned, weeds grew all over the place, the trees were left to themselves, there were no flowers. The old man had a distant, depressed look, like a drug-addict, but somewhat shiny eyes. He was curt and no longer went for long walks. But TV, he watched all the time, mostly at night, and then spent the days sleeping all the day long. I am not sure if he had been watching porn, but half-naked women wrestling on TV is almost as bad. It was sad to see the change. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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