Programming language explorations

This text is a tour of several modern programming languages in use today. The book teaches fundamental language concepts using a language-by-language approach. As each language is presented, the authors introduce new concepts as they appear, and revisit familiar ones, comparing their implementation with those from languages seen in prior chapters. The goal is to present and explain common theoretical concepts of language design and usage, illustrated in the context of practical language overviews.

Twelve languages have been carefully chosen to illustrate a wide range of programming styles and paradigms. The book introduces each language with a common trio of example programs, and continues with a brief tour of its basic elements, type system, functional forms, scoping rules, concurrency patterns, and sometimes, metaprogramming facilities.

"A Chapman & Hall book."

Introduction : Why study programming languages ; Programming languages elements ; Evaluating programming languages -- JavaScript : The basics ; Closures ; Methods ; Prototypes ; Scope ; Callbacks and promises -- CoffeeScript : The basics ; No shadowing?! ; Comprehensions ; Destructuring ; Existential operators -- Lua : The basics ; Scope ; Tables ; Metatables ; Coroutines -- Python : The basics ; Scope ; Parameter association ; Special methods ; Iterators and generators ; Decorators -- Ruby : The basics ; Object orientation : Messaging; Encapsulation; Inheritance; Polymorphism; Singleton classes ; Blocks ; Mixins ; Access control ; Metaprogramming -- Julia : The basics ; Types : Abstract types; Parametric types; Sum and product types; Type annotations; Covariance, contravariance, and invariance ; Multiple dispatch ; Metaprogramming ; Parallel computing -- Java : The basics ; Interfaces ; Static typing ; Generics ; Threads ; Metaprogramming -- Clojure : The basics ; Namespaces ; Persistent data structures ; Transients ; Software transactional memory ; Agents ; The expression problem ; Macros -- Elm : The basics ; Type inference ; Tagged unions ; Records ; Effects -- Erlang : The ba…