Book Review: Masterminds of Programming

Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages by Federico Biancuzzi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a lengthy book. The interviewers did a fantastic job with their questions and covered a range of expert programmers and language designers across the spectrum. The important thing I gained from reading this book was my "enthusiasm" again for different programming languages and styles.
Each different language creator had some "opinions" about the state of affairs and went about in a personal way to do something about it, create a language, create a community, solve the problem, and usually building on top of what the person had learned from others. The language creation is both a scientific process (standing upon the shoulders of giants), as well as the unique taste that each language designer brought to the table. I was excited to learn more about AWK, Haskell, Perl, and Eiffel as languages after reading this book.