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From: manis@cs.ubc.ca (Vincent Manis)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc,comp.edu
Subject: Re: Abelson & Sussman
Message-ID: <7222@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: 16 Mar 90 21:54:54 GMT
References: <3793@tukki.jyu.fi>
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Reply-To: manis@cs.ubc.ca (Vincent Manis)
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`the most biased programming book ever published'? I would have thought
that honour might have gone to Kernighan and Ritchie, which has not one
chapter on Scheme programming, or perhaps to Doug Comer's XINU books,
which claim to talk about operating systems, but don't provide any sort
of fair comparison with MVS and VMS. 

Let's also ignore the fact that Abelson and Sussman explicitly didn't
write a book on programming, but rather on computer science. I, for
example, consider `Paradise Lost' a piece of garbage, because this
Milton guy seems to know absolutely nothing about how to code Fortran
FORMAT statements.

In any case, any sort of worthwhile book has biases: the author(s) have
to decide what they think is important and what they think is
unimportant. One simply can't cover every important thing in any field
in an introductory course; in fact, the design of an introductory course
is very much an exercise in trying to find out what's really important
and what isn't.

--
\    Vincent Manis <manis@cs.ubc.ca>      "There is no law that vulgarity and
 \   Department of Computer Science      literary excellence cannot coexist."
 /\  University of British Columbia                        -- A. Trevor Hodge
/  \ Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1W5 (604) 228-2394