Interviews with programming language creators (2010) [pdf]
Here's a quote from the Ada interview with S. Tucker Taft>Do you have any advice for up-and-coming programmers?> Learn several different programming languages, and actually try to use them before developing a religious affection or distaste for them.> Try Scheme, try Haskell, try Ada, try Icon, try Ruby, try CAML, try Python, try Prolog. Don’t let yourself fall into a rut of using just one language, thinking that it defines what programming means.> Try to rise above the syntax and semantics of a single language to think about algorithms and data structures in the abstract. And while you are at it, read articles or books by some of the language design pioneers, like Hoare, Dijkstra, Wirth, Gries, Dahl, Brinch Hansen, Steele, Milner, and Meyer.I think this point...Try to rise above the syntax and semantics of a single language to think about algorithms and data structures in the abstract....is a stage that not many programmers reach (I certainly haven't). Agree or disagree? Or do you think it's importance is overstated?