Customer Reviews

The Handbook of Programming Languages (HPL): Object Oriented Programming Languages

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Some reviews for individual volumes in this set, as well as one for the set as a whole, complain of (1) omissions and (2) unmet expectations. A short quote from Peter Salus' introduction may help put these complaints in context: "The aim . . . is to provide a single comprehensive source of information concerning a variety of individual programming languages and methodologies for computing professionals." This work is intended to show the shape of a discipline and its history. It is not a programmer's reference manual.

Comprehensive does not mean all-inclusive. Any work comprised of many individual contributions is always a compromise, always a bit uneven. And editors have blind spots; on the second page of the introduction Salus omits any mention of Wilhelm Shickard when discussing early calculators. But give the guy a break! He is a linguist by training, not a historian specializing in medieval technology.

The publisher could have adjusted buyer expectations by providing a table of contents and list of contributors, as well as an excerpt from the introduction -- information that would be available both on Amazon and through the Library of Congress catalog. A complete contributor list IS now in the product "Wiki" for this volume.

Finally, a careful buyer, unsure whether a purchase will be worthwhile, can always check out a copy from the library first. Even public libraries which might not have this on the shelf can provide it through inter-library loan for a patron.

My first impressions about this handbook are not very favourable.

Although the first volume claims to be a handbook of object oriented languages it does not cover object oriented languages of Niklaus Wirth's group, e.g. Oberon-2 or its commercial dialect Component Pascal.

Additionally to that, a descendant of Wirth's languages, Modula-3, is claimed to be one of the smallest OO-languages. Due to the ignorance given to Oberon-2, this is only true for the OO languages covered in this handbook. In comparison to Oberon-2, Modula-3 is bloated (language report size is 60 pages vs. 20 pages).

The language family tree on the inside covers do not give the correct descendants/ancestors for some of the languages.

Scrolling through the second volume on imperative languages reveals similar problems: Pascal is only mentioned with its commercial dialect "Turbo Pascal", which -- at least in its last incarnation -- is an OO-language and not imperative one, and should therefore be covered in the first volume. It misses the ISO/ANSI standards (ISO 7185: Standard Pascal and ISO 10206: Extended Pascal). It misses to mention Modula-2 (as I recall from memory, since I did not buy the book).

Since - IMHO - a handbook should be some objective reference, the first two volumes do not meet my criteria for a handbook.

This book presents an interesting compilation of OOP languages and their history.

I purchased the book to deepen my knowledge of OOP languages - their similarities, differences, origins, strong points, and pitfalls. Although some of the content may be a little "boring" (e.g., the painfully detailed history of C++), the book provided a good overview of six different OOP languages (C++, SmallTalk, Ada, Java, Modula3, and Eiffel).

I'm not sure how the author selected which OOP languages to cover. It would seem that Object-Pascal (Delphi in particular) was completely overlooked even though it is much more prevelant in commercial implementations than Eiffel or Modula-3. Perhaps losing some of the C++ history and including an overview of additional OOP languages like Delphi would improve the book's usefulness.

Bottom-line: good start, but improvements could surely be made.

HPL : OOP Languages is an interesting collection of essays on OOP programming languages. That being said, its not surprising that each chapter is of varying quality and style. Some of the contributions are of very high quality and insightful; especially those by Stroustrup, Keonig (C++) and Meyer (Eiffel).

This book is a collection of essays. Point. There is no particular theme nor direction; each essay is independent of the rest of the book. This book is neither a tutorial or a reference work. (although it tries to pass off as one) Its a mix of both.

One common complaint about this book is that its views are biased and not objective in its survey of programming languages. However, we must remember that some of the articles are written by the inventors of the language itself so I don't think is possible for the inventor to be objective about his language. My complaint is that the section on Java is much too brief given its popularity. Also the chapter that introduces OOP is not particularly well written but it is a minor flaw as most the readers of this book are assumed to have a good understanding of OOP concepts.

An interesting and sometimes insightful survery of object programming languages. If you want to sample some of the major OOP languages and how they came to be then this book is an enjoyable read. HPL : OOP is an excellent collection of essays on OOP languages. However, it cannot be considered a reference by any stretch of imagination.