| > new books should use more modern popular languages to age well and to attract younger audience That doesn't make sense. Java is one of the most popular programming language, more popular than a lot of other "modern popular languages". The only languages more popular are either as old as Java (JavaScript, Python) or older (C, C++). C# might be one option, but it's close to Java, and I don't know if the support for Linux/MacOS was here at the time this book was started. Same thing for JavaScript and Python's popularity, which are relatively recent trends. On the other hand, Java has stayed and endured. It's still here and will still probably be here in 20 years. > on the JVM there are languages better suited for the topic (e.g. Scala by a large margin) Scala is less popular than Java, and harder to master. Once you consider Scala, you get into endless arguments about whether to use Scala, SML, OCaml, Haskell, etc. > There's already the "Language Implementation Patterns" book There is also "Writing an interpreter in Go" and "Writing a compiler in Go" that seem to cover the same ground. But I'm certain than more people know about interpreters and compilers thanks to these three books than thanks to any one of them. > but also gives you real life skills (e.g. ANTLR is used in most big data query engines) The majority of programming languages don't use a generated parser but a handmade recursive descent parser, because it's the best at error reporting. There's a good post about different parsing approaches by Laurence Tratt: https://tratt.net/laurie/essays/entries/which_parsing_approa.... Generated parsers are great for DSLs but that won't teach you how the programming languages that you use work. |