Review on the book "Masterminds of Programming"
Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages, 1st Edition by Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden, published by O'Reilly Media, Inc., in Apr 2009.
This is a nice book that interests people immediately if you want to know more about programming languages and this book consists of interviews of creators of a dozen more languages.
We know and use some of the languages covered in these interviews. For those languages we don't know, sometimes it is a bit hard to understand some points made by those creators. I believe we should try out those languages and then come back to read this book again to see if we can appreciate more of what these creators say. Even though we don't necessarily use those languages in our daily work, it is still beneficial to learn some new languages once in a while. Just keep an open mind. :)
It is also interesting to know that some of these creators have contradictory views and it is good to learn these arguments from both sides. That is why we believe there is more than one way to do it.
Judging from a personal perspective, probably the UML chapter is among the best because it goes beyond programming language issues and provides good food for thought by software developers.