Over my last few flights I’ve been reading Masterminds of Programming by Federico Biancuzzi. It’s a collection of interviews with the creators of a whole bunch of different programming languages, and is quite full of advice and insight, even for those of us who’ll never design a language.

I expected to be most interested in the interviews about languages I have some exposure to (eg. C#, C++, SQL, Objective-C) but was surprised to find myself much more intrigued by the discussions on unfamiliar languages (eg. Eiffel, Lua, Forth, Haskell).

The other surprise was how funny many of the interviews are, although perhaps much of the humour is unintentional. It’s a stark reminder that these language designers are very much human, and prone to pettiness and rivalry as much as the rest of us.

For example, Bertrand Meyer rejecting a question on Design by Contract in Eiffel and putting it back on “Gosling, Stroustrop, Alan Kay or Hejlsberg” how they could possibly design a language without it? “Asking why one uses Design by Contract is like asking people to justify Arabic numerals. It’s those using Roman numerals for multiplication who should justify themselves”

Or James Gosling, when asked about C# borrowing from Java : “C# basically took everything, although they oddly decided to take away the security and reliability stuff by adding all these sorts of unsafe pointers, which strikes me as grotesquely stupid”

I found myself reading it in quite a convoluted order, as I’d finish one chapter, say Gosling’s Java chapter, and then want to jump over and read the C# chapter to see if Anders would justify his “grotesquely stupid” decision.

Two small criticisms though. First, it could do with a little more editing. Some of the interviews seem to have taken place over a few sittings, and so tend to repeat themselves a bit. Anders Hejlsberg’s is probably the most obvious example (but worth reading anyway, as he is at his pragmatic and reasonable best)

Second, for the languages with which I wasn’t familiar, I’d have loved some code samples.

That aside, it’s an interesting, informative and occasionally thought-provoking read. Probably as close to a geek’s coffee table book as I’ve come across.