After neglecting the book for some months due to finals season, I managed to finish “Masterminds of Programming” by O’Reilly. It is a somehow unusual book, since it consists entirely of interviews. I was sceptical at first, because interviewers usually pose the same set of stupid questions to everybody and see what happens but the authors fortunately went another way: it seems like they really prepared the questions that they wanted to pose each interviewee specifically after learning at least a bit on the topic.
The interviewees were by the way creators of several popular and also not-so popular languages. And the variety was quite astonishing. The funny part is, that from the interview you could judge the author pretty well in his technical views.
My favorite interviews where these that were surprising, that explained some historical quirks or context instead of just trying to plug the respective language. One of my favorite interviews was the one with Charles Geschke and John Warnock about PostScript, why PostScript is like it is. I also quite enjoyed reading Gosling about (not only Java) and he seems like a really smart person. Anders Hejlsberg of C# surprised me too, by not bashing on Java but instead on highlighting how to grow a language and how LINQ fits into C#. Then there’s the people who think their creation is the bees knees like Meyer’s Eiffel but does not convince very much. The interview with Larry Wall was also quite good, Larry Wall does not dabble too much in promoting Perl but he does not get lost in talking about blurb either.
The only interview that I ended up skipping was Robin Milner (of ML). This guy seems to be insanely smart but I have no idea what they were talking about in the firt part of the interview apart from not being very interesting for me. But the interviewers did a great job, they sounded like they understood Milner, so that’s a plus, I guess.
The biggest surprise was maybe UML. Jacobson raves on how UML is great and the second part of the interview is with Rumbaugh who seems to be desillusioned and sees the faults of UML and in I ended up agreeing a lot with him in just about every topic. Did not expect him to be so reflective and in the end kinda pessimistic about UML. Booch is somewhere in the middle ground.
And there is the interviews you can’t agree at all. Brad Cox of Objective-C was raving about SOA all the time. And in general, his observations were weird and I wouldn’t recommend taking his advices. What’s als funny: later in the book somebody else dismisses SOA as useless, which made me smile.
Overall, I can recommend the book. I got it from the university library, so I didn’t pay anything so the payoff was somewhere in the region of infinity, but well, the book is unique and the selection of topics is good. So if you have some spare time and money, get it.