views:

139

answers:

3

Of course, by 'advanced' I mean here just something beyond what every programmer does know. I'm currently more-or-less comfortable with the basics and want to understand the most important, most elegant and most practically applicable achievements of modern type theory.

I just do not have much time, desire and mental powers to study all the formalistics more thoroughly and that may change in the future. But there is something really attractive for me in that branch, that just forces to ask silly questions like this :)

Thank you very much!

+3  A: 

Go read Lambda the Ultimate Getting Started.

Doug Currie
"Here's a nice intro to Polymorphic Type Inference, by Michael Schwartzbach. It's not quite as specific as it might sound — it defines a "tiny functional language" in order to illustrate type inference, and also covers the relationship between types and logic, including the Curry-Howard isomorphism." - decided to pick up this one for now :) Thx
Bubba88
The link was broken, but all the hail to Google-cache :)
Bubba88
+4  A: 

The best gentle introduction I know of are Benjamin Pierce's books Types and Programming Languages and Advanced Topics in Types and Programming Languages. They take you all the way from the untyped lambda calculus to objects and beyond, to "research-y" topics like linear types, dependent types, and module systems.

Chris Conway
I've just visited the website of Benjamin Pierce's and was overwhelmed by amount of publications on different topics and it seems that the research scope of this scientist is very broad. He does photography also!) Your suggestion can be very helpful as soon as I'll get to the books you've mentioned. Thank you!
Bubba88
+2  A: 

I really enjoyed Basic Simple Type Theory by Roger Hindley (of Hindley/Milner Type Inference fame). It's short, and clear and should get you up to speed pretty quickly.

Brian Postow
Very good suggestion, thanks!
Bubba88