The title of Tanaka-Ishii’s book, Semiotics of Programming, leads the casual reader to believe the book’s content resides in an academic niche without much general impact on cognitive technology.  The work may at first seem irrelevant to those professionals outside the small group of interdisciplinary researchers working in computational semiotics.  However, after carefully reading the text, my opinion is that this impression does not hold up.  The content of this book is far from the narrowly focused treatise its title suggests.  In fact, Tanaka-Ishii’s work considers fundamental and important issues in computation, philosophy, linguistics, and simulation.

McDaniel, R. (2010). Book review: Semiotics of programming by Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii. Journal of Cognitive Technology, 15(2). 61-62.