Pardon me, but some of the "major programming languages" listed in this book are not so major at all. Even if skipping the very early languages like Fortran, many true titans are missing completely: Pascal and Modula, C, and of course ADA! Pascal is not even being mentioned in the index, albeit for example Brad Cox mentions it on several places in chapter 11. This brings me to the poor quality of the index in this book: ADA is being mentioned in the index with page 374, but in fact it is being mentioned by several contributors, for example by Brad Cox on page 258. Reader will quickly find numerous other misses in the index.
It is hardly appropriate to call Forth, APL, Objective-C, Eiffel or Lua etc. as "major languages." All of there were/are in a marginal use at best, or even in a complete obscurity.
Probably the selection of the languages was dictated by the set their creators being available for an interview or willing to participate in this project.
I second the opinion of other reviewers that the author of C++ all too often digresses into compares to Java, some of them of a banal nature "C++ differs from Java in that its underlying machine is the real machine rather than a single abstract machine", what is true for virtually every language translated into a specific machine code. I miss in his chapter any self critical reference to the incurring maintenance problems with C++, which are caused by its cryptic set of syntactic ambiguities and amount of implicit object creations. These features have ultimately led to a ban of C++ in some places, most notably in my company Oracle. I happen to second this decision and I believe that C++ was the most prominent example of a language misdesign, the wrong way into which the programming was pushed by coincidence of coming from the back than so famous AT&T Labs. I was hoping to read some words of self criticism. Instead, if asked why some major projects are still written in C, Stroustrup speaks on page 8 of "conservatism and inertia". Nope, its not true, its rather prudence and need to predictable maintenance.
Of course, this opinion about C++ is my own and in no way diminishing the value of this book. Its authors did asked the critical questions, and they merely quote the answers. C++ is clearly one of the major languages, for good or (as I believe) for wrong. My point of criticism on this book is lack of separation between major and secondary languages, lack of even mention of truly influential languages which changed the world of computing (Algol, Pascal), and its poor index.
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