. While the title is pretentious, the premise was interesting in that here are 17 well-used languages, so what was the designer thinking? Why did he make the choices that he did?Alas, it was not quite to be. Interesting yes, but the discussions were sometimes more general involving all of computer science. Yet nearly every interview had memorable lines and claims; a few of which I shall reproduce here:
"C is a reasonably good language for compilers to generate, but the idea that humans beings should program in it is completely absurd." - Bertrand Meyer, Eiffel
"One of our programming languages guys proposed a competition in which people would program the same program in all three of those [languages] and we'd see .... It turned out the only thing we figured out is it all depended on where the brightest programmer went...." - Charles Geschke, PostScript
"A good programmer writes good code quickly. Good code is correct, compact and readable. 'Quickly' means hours to days."
and
"An operating system does absolutely nothing for you. As long as you had something - a subroutine called a disk driver, a subroutine called some kind of communication support, in the modern world, it doesn't do anything else." - Chuck Moore, FORTH
"I do recommend [C++] and not everybody is reluctant. In fact, I don't see much reluctance in [system software or embedded systems] beyond the natural reluctance to try something new in established organizations. Rather, I see steady and significant growth in C++ use."
and
"I have never seen a program that could be written better in C than in C++. I don't think such a program could exist." - Bjarne Stroustrup, C++
So now I go to Amazon to remove the book from the list to read, and record a score of 3 out of 5.
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