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Passages

Published:09 July 2020Publication History
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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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          cover image ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
          ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes  Volume 45, Issue 3
          July 2020
          32 pages
          ISSN:0163-5948
          DOI:10.1145/3402127
          Issue’s Table of Contents

          Copyright © 2020 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s)

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          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          • Published: 9 July 2020

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