"Since then I have written a bunch of ray tracers in Pascal, Fortran, Scheme, C, C++, Java, and most recently Swift (which is awesome for writing ray tracers). "
What makes Swift so good for writing ray tracers?
What makes Swift so good for writing ray tracers?
Will definitely be buying the book.
Both the computing tech and raytracing/graphics theory and algorithms have changed significantly over that time, with better algorithms and much more powerful computing resources allowing more brute-force/accurate stuff to be more practically done.
Writing a raytracer/renderer is also rather addictive, and it's quite cool writing something which produces something else (as is writing compilers).
Currently I'm doing a C++ one that describes the model, colour handling and animation etc. using the type system directly rather than a traditional class hierarchy. https://github.com/KayEss/AnimRay