No it doesn't because it only covers techniques you can use in implementing and optimizing old-school static languages.

But today a language is more than just the compiler, with modern VMs coming into play, and runtime optimizations aren't covered ... for instance if you want to implement a tracing JIT compiler, your only hope is to read the source-code of some available VM. Or if you want a precise garbage collector ... well, good luck with that.

That's one reason the implementations of dynamic languages are so shitty ... the effective techniques for doing it are yet to be explored / documented.

So if you want a book on implementing compilers, I recommend this one ... http://pragprog.com/titles/tpdsl/language-implementation-pat...

There are introductory texts that might not cover the same amount of theory, but at least get you from nowhere to being able to write a basic compiler from start to finish. If you do want some serious theory, particularly on optimizations, then Muchnick blows the Dragon Book away. If you want to work with different kinds of programming language, notably functional programming with a lambda calculus foundation, then these ideas barely appear in the Dragon Book and again there are specialised texts that would serve you much better. What is the target audience for the Dragon Book actually meant to be?

As noted elsewhere in this thread, I think that, in contrast to the OPs article, everyone should read it or Hollub's excellent work that followed the Dragon book by a number of years.

So I would disagree with your opinion about this being a good book, but then I may have the advantage of having spent substantially more time with it.

It's entirely possible to use the techniques in the book to, say, whip up a compiler in Ruby that turns an inconvenient data format into JSON. The real utility of doing this by hand in 2010 is, however, debatable.

[0] Ok, the multi-platform support of some of the CL implementations could be better.

But how does lua bears lisp inheritance in its implementation? IIRC lua does not use pointer tagging which is a typical lispism, uses tables for everything, has no lists, and uses a different approach for implementing closures.

Are you thinking of LuaJIT(2) ?

Lua uses a type tag + union rather than tagged pointers because it's not strictly portable, and they've placed a high priority on strict ANSI C compliance (with the sole exception of dynamic library loading). Also, Lua tables recognize when they're being used as arrays and use an array internally.

If modern languages are more than a compiler, that does not denies the ability of the book to cover how to write a compiler.

But such detailed info isn't necessary even to write a compiler front end. It's good that the treatment exists, and that it's in the dragon book, but it's not what you need, even for parsing.

While that is true, the Dragon Book gives real insight into how a compiler really works and how to code one from scratch. If someone is only interested in getting a very basic compiler up and running quickly and not interested in understanding how to really make one, a simple tutorial for yacc should suffice.

> If modern languages are more than a compiler, that does not denies the ability of the book to cover how to write a compiler.

True, but the best way IMHO to learn about compilers is to start more lightly and then to read lots of source-code.

Yes. The book is "saturated" with ANTLR. I wouldn't buy it if you don't like ANTLR. Also, (purely imho) it spends too much time on the front end (lexing/parsing) and not enough on the rest. I have yet to see good books (other than DCPL or L.I.S.P) which uses a simple concrete syntax (s-expressions say) and focuses on the rest of compiler building.

Yes, but it explains the parsing techniques used by ANTLR, and for learning stuff it's quite OK. It uses ANTLR as a teaching tool, but you don't have to keep using it afterwards.

For writing simple parsers you don't even need to read a book ... just use a parser combinator based on PEGs, like http://wiki.github.com/sirthias/parboiled/ and you'll be fine.

If you want a general purpose language however, even if you use a tool like Parboiled, you'll need to know how its guts work. It is also a good idea for a compiler to be self-hosting, because it's more portable that way and the compiler's code itself is a good test for your language ... so you'll need to know how to implement a parser by hand.

Of course, after the parser is done you'll need to have an AST, and maybe you'll want to optimize it ... this book is thin on such details, but it's better to start somewhere and books like the Red Dragon are quite heavy and can put you off the target before writing a single line of code.

Memorable quote:

"It's a common belief that garbage collection means inferior performance, because everyone who has gotten into programming in the last decade regards manual storage management as a fact of life, and totally discounts the effort and performance impact of doing everything by hand.

In a large application, a good garbage collector is more efficient than malloc/free. "

(Disclaimer: I haven't read it myself, and don't plan to. My reading stack is close to overflowing as it is.)

That the examples are in "assembly language" is a red herring, since the machine the book targets is deliberately simplified. The "assembly" is just a notation. The idea, which seems to be to make the examples as concrete as possible, is beginner-friendly --- as anyone who's been tripped up by mistakes and ambiguities in older Sedgewick books can attest.

--Knuth, in Coders at Work

TAOCP is like that.

That being said, I haven't finished the series.

What a strange thing to say.

I've read all of the books in the "Claim To Have Read" list and only a couple in the "Have Actually Read" list. So based on my experience I have no problem believing that programmers at least as dumb as me have read the same.

What do you find in this book that (1) you are unlikely to find elsewhere, and (2) which are critically important to be a decent software engineer? The way I see it, we don't even need to know OO to be a good programmer. (By the way, is there a difference between "programmer" and "software engineer?)

Disclaimer: my current opinion about OO is that it mostly sucks. Alas, I don't know if it is because I know too little or too much of it.

Unfortunately OOP won, in the face of all alternatives, so either you like it or not, you're going to need it.

As to why OOP has won ... as with imperative programming in general, it's easier to wrap your head around it without much theoretical background. I have trouble seeing a 10 year-old learning category theory to be able to read/write files in Haskell (contrary to popular beliefs, you do need lots of knowledge when wanting to combine monads).

It's all about polymorphism, which enables composability / reuse / decoupling.

In OOP polymorphism is natural. In Haskel, the only static / functional language where polymorphism is done right, the learning curve is quite high.

Languages from the ML family are very suitable for symbolic processing (theorem proving, compilers), but OOP is versatile and can be used efficiently on a whole range of problems ... including writing compilers ... http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/

You might have been burnt by the static OOP languages, trouble is OOP mixes with static typing like oil and water ... take a look at Smalltalk or at CLOS sometimes. CLOS is even more capable as it supports things like multi-dispatching.

I have. This is crushing. And the fact that they won't die any time soon makes me feel worse. One of my colleague even said to me with a straight face that "serious" programming couldn't be done but in C++ (if only he had omited the "but").

I think the problem of Haskell isn't it's learning curve. It's where you have to start from: scratch. Someone who know C, Java and Python won't be able to use much of their knowledge to learn Haskell. On the other hand, Haskell could be taught as a first programming course. (Like Ocaml was in my case).

> including writing compilers ... http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/

Is this still OO?? The core language is based on pattern-matching! The way I see it, the OO part has been pushed to the periphery. If I do parsing in OMeta, I doubt I could claim I did it in an OO way.

I see two important benefits from Patterns:

1. As a (partial) replacement for experience. I've been doing this for 20+ years, and I'd encountered most of it at some point before reading the book, so it's not essential in this respect. But someone just starting out could assimilate directly a chunk of what I had to figure out on my own. And even for someone with more experience, it standardizes the details of the pattern, leading to greater consistency in the software.

2. To provide a common vocabulary amongst developers. When discussing a design with someone who's read the book, I can say "I think we can solve that by using the strategy pattern", and they'll know what I mean. Without this common vocabulary we'd spend a lot more time explaining, and at greater risk of being misunderstood.

is there a difference between "programmer" and "software engineer?

This is just my philosophy, but I think that computer programming in itself is a simple activity, you could teach 'most anybody to write a program -- and that's the reason that so much software sucks. When done correctly it's an engineering discipline, including analysis, modeling, planning, documenting, and a certain degree of programming. But the actual implementation of code is a minority of the job.

The way I see it, we don't even need to know OO to be a good programmer. ... my current opinion about OO is that it mostly sucks

Given my definition above, I'd have to agree that you don't need to know or do OO in order to be a programmer. But if you aspire to the fuller job of software engineering, it would be foolish to exclude such an important tool from your repertoire.

Regardless of its actual merits, it's objectively true that a huge portion (I'd think even a majority) of development tools (including platforms, languages, IDEs, frameworks, libraries, etc.) are geared toward OO development. Eschewing those means that you're forgoing much of the foundational stuff that our predecessors have built for us (standing on the shoulders of giants and all).

I'll grant that the industry in the '90s may have been a bit manic about OO. Since then we've learned that the paradigm has weaknesses and indeed flaws. But we do generally know what those are, and have found ways to work around them. We understand now that C++ is (insanely) complex and rigid, and modern OO manages to retain most of the benefits while shedding those problems. The contemporary dynamic languages build on a foundation of OO development while avoiding many of its pitfalls (at the low level at least). And what I think of as the cutting edge, the dynamic languages, seem to have found a way to deliver their benefit while generally coexisting with the OO paradigm. Which, of course, ties back to what I said earlier about keeping your toolbox full for whatever can best solve a problem.

Now, there is still something that bothers me. OO is obviously very important. However, network effects look like they play a huge part. I am a perfectionist. As such, I wouldn't like to settle for a local maximum. For example I feel that IDE aside, functional programming with an advanced type system is better than OO for most purposes (ML and Haskell fit this pet paradigm of mine).

The problem is that I fail to see how OO could be important by itself. (Like I fail to see how Windows could survive GNU/Linux in a world where every programs and drivers ship on both.) As anecdotal evidence, I can't solve a quite universal problem: the representation of optional data. With inductive types (also called sum types, or algebraic data types), this is easy:

    -- Type definition
    data Option a = Nothing
                  | Something a
    
    -- Example of use
    case computation-that-may-fail
      Nothing     -> "I failed"
      Something x -> "I succeeded. Result: " ++ show x

Someone who know C, Java and Python won't be able to use much of their knowledge to learn Haskell. On the other hand, Haskell could be taught as a first programming course. (Like Ocaml was in my case).

I think you're falling prey to the reverse of this problem: your mind is stuck in functional-land, and you need to switch your mode of thinking for success in an OO setting.

The approach to this is clunky in C++, Java, or C#. The normal approach is for the "parent" object to contain a collection of its optional attributes. One would insert new attributes into this collection, and request their values from there later. Another approach you'll see, depending on the needs, is to use generics or templates to package the attribute with sidecar information that indicates whether it's actually "there", as with C# nullable types.

In newer dynamic languages like python (which is an evolution of the OO paradigm), though, this is simplicity itself. Indeed, it's at the heart of dynamic programming, and is what I referred to in my previous post when I criticized the rigidity of C++. In python, one isn't bound by the static definitions of an interface. If you want to add an additional attribute to your object, well, what are waiting for? Just go and add that attribute to it. Later on, use duck typing to handle the presence or absence as necessary.

Most probably. But there's a reason for that: I don't like mutable state[1]. And I'm not sure you can try to avoid mutable state and still do OO.

[1]: http://www.loup-vaillant.fr/articles/assignment

    data Animal = Animal { name :: String,
                           is_awake :: Time -> Bool,
                           lives_in :: Environment -> Bool }

Other OO things could be built as well in a perfectly functional way, picking and choosing the bits of the definition of OO you want. What you can't do is choose exactly what C++ or Java gives you, and what you don't get is a Blessed Object Orientation Technique like you do with those languages. But you can program OO just as you can in C. (Only better in most ways. Note you don't get a BOOT in C either, but there are nevertheless OO C programs.)

Mutability is merely one dimension of OO, a term that is so flexible it basically means nothing without further qualification. OO has its place even in a functional program sometimes, as that link shows.

We can also define OO as the use of inheritance. The problem with inheritance is that it spurs the violation of decoupling. More often than not, derived classes are tightly coupled to their base class. I don't like that. This paper also suggest that inheritance is not very good, because it would increase the error rate by 6: http://www.leshatton.org/Documents/OO_IS698.pdf (Note that I don't take this paper as a proof that OO is bad in general. Rather, it strongly suggest that C++ without templates nor the STL, used in an OO fashion, is worse than plain C).

Now, if you forbid (or severely limit) both mutable state and inheritance, I really don't see what is left to OO. We could see you `Animal` data type and the Ocaml module system as forms of OO, but at this point, "OO" would mean anything (and therefore be meaningless).

(Note: when I say "I don't like X", I mean I will avoid X as long as the resulting solution isn't demonstrably simpler.)

Check out Erlang's parametrized modules, a form of functional OO.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.58....

I read it, hated it, and would never recommend it for a few reasons, but mostly because I already knew Common Lisp when I read it (though I was writing Java full-time in my day job at the time) and so each time I read a new pattern I would think about how it was usually just an ugly hack to work around the poor design of a language like Java.

You might argue that a "real software engineer" will have to use crappy languages at some point and so should know the hacks to compensate. I'd argue that knowledge of a bunch of different languages makes those hacks obvious anyway - so I'd tell people to just spend time learning lots of languages instead of reading the patterns book.

I found a book like Head First Design Patterns to be much more bottom-up. It hammers home the idea that discrete design patterns really are just the organic side-effects of applying concepts (meta-patterns?) like "composition over inheritance", "don't repeat yourself", etc., to recurring problems in computer science.

For one thing, I don't know how you can lump things like Head First Design Patterns or whatever the TDD one is in with things like Code Complete or Programming Pearls.

For another thing, I have read at least parts of all of the books that apparently programmers don't really read, and judging from the books on colleagues' desks (not the bookshelves) so have a lot of other people I've worked with. The same is certainly not true of the "books programmers do read" list.

After learning OOP with Smalltalk, it seemed a step in the wrong direction.

C is fine though. And TCPL is a fine book too.

I also never managed to finish "Code Complete".

To be fair, I also had exposure to Cincom's Mantis. That further spoiled me. To the point I still want a 3278 for my living room.

The books you end up reading are consequences of the steps you take in your career.

[0] http://appdev.cincom.com/

The various books are really different, people's reading strategies are different, people's tastes are different. People who have been in the field longer tend to have read more books. Also, whether or not you have "finished" a book tends to be irrelevant in nonfiction. If you can't get through Code Complete in one sitting, try reading it in bits and pieces - it shows signs of having been designed for that. If you haven't "finished" TAoCP... you and Knuth have something in common.

(For the record, I have read all of Code Complete at none time or another, but I've barely touched TAoCP. Which is not a problem. It is good to have things to look forward to. As someone once said: What's the point of having a collection of nothing but things you have already read?)

Did you ever see that stack overflow post which says in dozens of ways that you can't fully take apart (parse) HTML with regular expressions? If not, you should. It is informative and entertaining.

Don't you think that if those who attempt to separate HTML with regular expressions had read and understood either of the dragon books that they would even try the task with RE? I don't. Once you put something like parsing and code generation in your personal toolbox, you would be surprised at the tasks before you that are a lot less intimidating.

I agree with Thomas about TAOCP. I'll give you a particular example. Volume 2, "Seminumerical algorithms" has a description of how to do long division. It turns out that we needed to do that when shipping a C compiler for 8086/80286 targets that didn't have an '87. And there is a reference to it in Coders at Work about that particular rare case that turns up only seldom.

Have you read the chapter on random number generation? How he made up this convoluted procedure to use one number to go to a page in a reference book to pick another number, and eventually ended up with a cycle of numbers that was disasterously small? It is fun.

And having an original edition and the recently issued boxed set, it is fun to see some of the problems change from HM 50 to something else. For example Fermats Last Theorem.

The lesson from that is repeated in people writing and using crypto. Just ask Tom.

While there are downsides to a university education, as often pointed out here on hacker news, the experience take you, if you are willing, to places that you wouldn't have on your own.

Similarly, the problem in front of you might not automatically make you run to get the dragon book or the others on the list, perhaps a friend can twist your arm to get you to read it.

You don't always know what you need ahead of time. There is a common word for that here, I think.

Edit: And I should add - that's why they're still valuable even in the Internet era. The "pure compilation of awesome content" aspect is a compelling reason to have them.

    - C Programming Language (2nd Edition)
    - Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
    - The Mythical Man-Month
    - Programming Pearls

If you feel you've almost gotten OO, but not quite, then Refactoring is a great book. That one lit up the "ah ha" lightbulb for me.

But I really grew fond of the Visitor Pattern, because you can do a lot with very little code.

Computer Graphics is the best school for Object Oriented thinking, I've found.