Hah! I'm also Rodrigo, and I've been living in Canada for 6 years now. I've given up hoping people would get the pronunciation of my name right. At this point I think I'm even more used to the North-American way. Rodrigo is a hella hard name if you've never spoken Portuguese.
I'm stoked for the book. I'm surprised-but-not-really that it will use JavaScript as its main language to teach the concepts!
> When I wrote the first edition I was frustrated that I was having to write the book's code in a language that was significantly worse than the language I preferred (Smalltalk). Little did I know that I would take another step downwards twenty years later.
But the compelling reason for choosing it over Java is that isn't wholly centered on classes.
That doesn't explain why choose it from among the majority of other languages that aren't centered on classes. JavaScript is so quirky, it seems like a really strange choice for a general programming book.
Python is amazing for these types of books. Written with the intention in mind, the actual code reads like pseudo-code, and a good percentage of people have interacted with the language at least briefly. Though the latter point is certainly more relevant for JS.
I'm sure the author had his reasons, and there are certainly worse choices in the top dozen languages. (Refactoring... in PHP!)
> Such a language needed to be widely popular, among the top half a dozen in language popularity surveys. It really helps to have a C-based syntax, since most programmers would recognize the basic code structure
You can argue others, but at least this will help you understand why he chose it over many other languages that aren't centered on classes.
As a soon-to-graduate Masters CS student in a top research university, I'd like to share, for what it seems, a different opinion and experience about this matter.
I came here from a 3rd world country that lacks a good education; Most of my CS experience and knowledge, at that time, came from the Internet, books, and personal projects. After working hard, I was accepted to this university as an MSc student.
I have never learned this amount of quality content as I've been learning in these past 2 years in this MSc program. Deep topics and subjects like programming language theory, low-level knowledge in distributed systems and machine learning, all this being taught by excellent researchers in their respective fields.
This was the first year, the course requirements part of the MSc program. Now I'm halfway through my research, and again, I've been learning tons. I've been writing very interesting code, building amazing things, writing papers, and working on my own ideas. I've never been this close to amazing scientists and engineers. This is priceless, in my opinion.
I've worked in the industry (before the MSc. program), it was super great. But I can confidently say that the MSc. program has made me a better engineer and taught me how to do proper research. I'm sure this may vary from university to university, department to department, and most importantly, from advisor to advisor. But that has been my experience!
Hey, thank you for the product, I will be using it regularly.
One feature request though: I'd like to use Readwise as my "central dump of highlights," but not every highlight I have is in my Kindle, it would be nice if it allowed to manually insert highlights I find elsewhere (e.g website, physical book).
