Masterminds of Programming
Masterminds of Programming features exclusive interviews with the creators of several historic and highly influential programming languages. In this unique collection, you'll learn about the processes that led to specific design decisions, including the goals they had in mind, the trade-offs they had to make, and how their experiences have left an impact on programming today. Masterminds of Programming includes individual interviews with: Adin D. Falkoff: APL Thomas E. Kurtz: BASIC Charles H. Moore: FORTH Robin Milner: ML Donald D. Chamberlin: SQL Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan: AWK Charles Geschke and John Warnock: PostScript Bjarne Stroustrup: C++ Bertrand Meyer: Eiffel Brad Cox and Tom Love: Objective-C Larry Wall: Perl Simon Peyton Jones, Paul Hudak, Philip Wadler, and John Hughes: Haskell Guido van Rossum: Python Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo and Roberto Ierusalimschy: Lua James Gosling: Java Grady Booch, Ivar Jacobson, and James Rumbaugh: UML Anders Hejlsberg: Delphi inventor and lead developer of C# If you're interested in the people whose vision and hard work helped shape the computer industry, you'll find Masterminds of Programming fascinating.
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- There's a more comprehensive interview that also includes Aho and Weinberger in the book Masterminds of Programming. Highly recommended
- * A Brief History | Babbage Engine : https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/history/
* https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/insider-memb...
* First OOP programming language was Simula (~1961). : ( https://history-computer.com/simula-guide/ / https://twobithistory.org/2019/01/31/simula.html )
* simula : https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/a-detailed-1978-history-of...
* Simula & smalltalk : https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~charlie/courses/15-214/2014-fall/sli...
* Coding From 1849 to 2022: a Guide to The Timeline of Programming Languages by Severine Hierso https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/insider-memb...
* "Hello, World!": The History of Programming Paperback by Prof James Steinberg (Author)
* Software: A Technical History (ACM Books) by Kim W Tracy (Author)
* The Dawn of Software Engineering: from Turing to Dijkstra by Edgar G. Daylight (Author), Niklaus Wirth (Author), et. al
* History of Programming Languages (Acm Monograph Series) by Richard L. Wexelblat (Editor)
* Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages (Theory in Practice (O'Reilly)) by Federico Biancuzzi (Author), Chromatic (Author)
Related with narrower, non-OOP focus:
* Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think by Andy Oram (Author), Greg Wilson (Author)
* Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick Brooks Jr. (Author)
* 6 programming languages invented by women : https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/6-programming-languages-that-a...
* Just what is TeX? : https://www.tug.org/whatis.html
* MUMPS : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS
* CAche Objectscript : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cach%C3%A9_ObjectScript
- A lot of great books are already mentioned.
I also enjoyed "Masterminds of Programming: Conversations With The Creators Of Major Programming Languages" [0]
It's a collection of interviews with creators of languages (FORTH, C++, Python, Haskell, and many more) You learn a lot about language design decisions and their pitfalls.
And a shameless plug: I shared MapFilterFold as a Show HN earlier, a project that collects recommendations from Ask HN threads. Browsing the books tagged computer science might yield some interesting results[1]
[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596515170/
[1] https://mapfilterfold.com/books/?genre=computer%20science
- YMMV but I found Masterminds of Programming quite a worthy read. It is an interview based book and talks to the creators of a variety programming languages, including such 'obscure' ones as Forth, APL and Eiffel. I am interested in programming languages in a meta way, and even dabble around designing a couple, so it was inspirational to me, also quite an eye opener.
- Here's a few things I found myself, if anyone is interested:
Book: MacLellan's Principles of Programming Languages. The principles are listed here: http://www.lshift.net/blog/2006/06/24/bruce-j-maclennans-pro...
Book: Masterminds of Programming. Interviews with the designers of many languages. Not all equally good.
Papers and Media: History of Programming Languages, proceedings 1-3. The third one includes video. (Paywalled -need an ACM subscription) Many classic articles including Kay on Smalltalk, Richie on C, McCarthy on Lisp. Iverson on APL. More recent languages include Haskell, Self, Lua. Many obscure but interesting languages like ZPL, Beta, Modula, etc.
- I was inspired to check out AWK after reading this sentence from the book Masterminds of Programming:
"If I had to choose a word to describe our centering forces in language design, I’d say Kernighan emphasized ease of learning; Weiberger, soundness of implementation; and I, utility. I think AWK has all three of these properties."
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