The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

Why The hobbit? Especially in the light of further hobbit heros in the Lord of the Rings. If you try to name this book you can see Tolkien's problem: "A hobbit's journey", whilst still maintaining the hook of a neologism in the title does not have the same ring. What would you expect of a book entitled "The Orang Utang" or "The Marsh Arab" or "The Lesser Spotted Howda"? Maybe the title should be compared to "The Liverpudlian" or "The Cockney" which captures both senses: a treatise on the type or the distinguished individual of the type. I don't think either expectation is met by "The Hobbit" and think that this is the start of an off balance feeling that crops up again when Tolkien talks directly to the reader in an over familiar way. "As I am sure you have already guessed" jerks you out of your view-point into being narrated at.

I did not find any type setting errors but there were some oddities of a more semantic type.

Smaug's body fell on the town but then was in deep water.

The escape from the Elfen King's hall in barrels just screams drowned dwarves: there is a suggestion that the barrels might have air holes, but the lids are banged down and the dwarfs are in them for twelve hours or more. Some of the barrels ship water. The dwarves are in a bad way after this but I think it more likely they would have asphyxiated and or drowned.

There is some very clumsy stuff at the very heart of the book, or at least the heart of the work composed of "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings", where Bilbo is riddling with Gollum.




Apparently Tolkien knew Welsh, which is probably why the reading is relatively easy, but oh my the howlers to my ears: its carven, carven, carven all the time with him.

Introduction to Functional Programming using Haskell

The course text for the Oxford University Functional Programming MSc module, the tone of the book is mathematical rather than aimed at the practicing coder. Silly though it may seem the typesetting bothers me. It comes from the maths rather than programming school, so I took a while to determine if I was looking at one or two equals signs, and you have to translate in your head from a maths multiplication sign to star, which is the asterisk that you would actually use in the code. The decision to use greek characters in the text, which cannot be actually typed into a Haskell program, is typical of the complete disregard for anyone who struggles to keep up. The unthinking elitism caused by this lack of empathy is very off-putting. The kindest thing one can say is that it is more readable than Richard Bird's other well known book "Introduction to Functional Programming" written with Philip Wadler. I cannot reproduce in HTML the definition given in the book for multiplication, which should have read

multiply :: Num a => a -> a -> a
multiply x = x * x

By contrast the typesetting and get it done attitude of the Haskell chapter in "Seven languages in seven weeks" is much more readable and conveys the main points of the language. After that I was able to return to "Introduction to Functional Programming using Haskell" with more success. I am beginning to fear that Haskell, in a similar way to XML, may suffer from not having been written by computer people. XML seems to have attracted odds and ends from Psychology, Archeology and Law, Haskell seems to come from mathematicians (and it would not surprise me to find physicists). My starting, received, prejudice is that ML may the the programmer's functional language.

Errata

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