Abstract
Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden's Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages is a treasure. The book consists of interviews with the creators of, in order, C++, Python, APL, Forth, BASIC, AWK, Lua, Haskell, ML, SQL, Objective C, Java, C#, UML, Perl, PostScript, and Eiffel. Each chapter asks similar, but not identical questions, and the above-mentioned masterminds, including Larry Wall, James Gosling, Brian Kernighan, Bertrand Meyer, Robin Milner, Simon Peyton-Jones, Guido van Rossum, and Bjarne Stroustrop give a wide variety of answers. Some of the masterminds are charming, and many are contentious, even cranky; they are also, almost all, full of deep insights into the deepest problems of software engineering. This insight comes in two forms; first, programming languages are the mechanisms by which software engineering solutions are almost always produced. Second, perhaps even more importantly, creating and evolving a widely-used programming language is a heroic, Herculean, critical software engineering task. All of these masterminds have succeeded in a massive software engineering task; they are not mere ivory tower thinkers about software engineering, but have, in some cases, entire lives shaped by a single, extremely complex, software project. More on that key point below.
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