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From: sakkinen@tukki.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc,comp.edu
Subject: Abelson & Sussman
Summary: Most biassed programming text?
Message-ID: <3793@tukki.jyu.fi>
Date: 16 Mar 90 12:09:44 GMT
Reply-To: sakkinen@jytko.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen)
Organization: University of Jyvaskyla, Finland
Lines: 60

There were recently some postings that mentioned the book
"Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"
by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman
(whatever the 'with' may mean).
Someone flatly condemned it, while someone else had a high
opinion of it.

I now got my hands on a copy of the book (5. printing, 1987,
no changes to the original printing from 1985 mentioned).
The name is misleading: it should be "... of Lisp Programs".
The book contains a lot of stuff and may be very good in several
aspects. However, it is a strong entrant in the "most biassed
programming textbook ever published" competition.
This especially regarding that, according to the Preface, it
"... is the entry-level subject in computer science at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is required of all
students at MIT who major in electrical engineering or in
computer science ..."

Other programming languages than Lisp are mentioned only in short
footnotes or not at all, and mostly in a negative light.
Here is a short list, with the provision that if something had
been omitted from the book's index, I would probably not have
noted it.

Ada - no mention, except as under PL/1.
Algol 60 - 6 mentions; credit for the idea of block structure
           given in main text (not footnote)!
Algol 68 - no mention.
APL - 2 footnotes, both positive.
Basic - 1 footnote.
C - no mention; I don't blame the authors for this,
    IBM 360/370 assembler isn't treated either.
CLU - no mention.
Cobol - no mention!
Forth - no mention.
Fortran - 2 mentions, one of them being that Fortran is the only
          currently widespread language older than Lisp.
Modula(-2) - no mention.
ML - 1 footnote.
Occam - no mention.
Pascal - 4 mentions, all rather negative.
PL/1 - no mention, except the pejoratively intended phrase
       "Pascal-PL/I-Ada camp".
Prolog - 2 footnotes, rather positive.
Simula - no mention.
Smalltalk - not in the index, but I came across 1 footnote.
Snobol - no mention.

None of the object-oriented extensions of Lisp are mentioned in the book
as far as I could see; of course most of them (except Flavors) did not
exist or at least were not well known yet in 1985.

Markku Sakkinen
Department of Computer Science
University of Jyvaskyla (a's with umlauts)
Seminaarinkatu 15
SF-40100 Jyvaskyla (umlauts again)
Finland
          SAKKINEN@FINJYU.bitnet (alternative network address)