[mjn]

I'm considering it for the course I teach! Although one thing that draws me is it doesn't have too much extraneous detail off the main narrative thread.

I currently use parts of the textbook Programming Language Pragmatics [1], one of the semi-standard texts used by a lot of universities (plus some of my own course notes). That book isn't really readable straight through though. It's 992 pages long, and some of the chapters get bogged down in a ton of coverage of the landscape of design and implementation choices. As a reference book that has some pros: you can look up something like looping constructs, and get a very detailed tour of how languages from Algol-68 through Modula-2 and C# have taken different design and implementation strategies. But that's not the same as reading something as your first introduction to a subject.

[1] https://www.cs.rochester.edu/~scott/pragmatics/

[munificent]

> I currently use parts of the textbook Programming Language Pragmatics

That was the first PL book I read. I really liked it, but you're right that it's like a survey of the entire landscape. For a first book, I personally like getting a single guided tour so that I feel like I'm going somewhere and not just looking at everything from a distance.