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What comes to mind are the publications of the HOPL (History of Programming Languages) conference.

https://dl.acm.org/topic/conference-collections/hopl?sortBy=...

Sorted by most downloaded, the first page of results includes the history of Erlang, Haskell, C, C++, Smalltalk, Fortran, AppleScript, Lisp, Pascal, Prolog..

Many of the papers are written by the people who designed, developed, and maintained the programming language, its ecosystem and community.

What I find fascinating are their retrospective thoughts on what didn't work well, regrets of what turned out to be bad design decisions. The authors also often reflect on how far programming in general has evolved, what aspects and features have become expected, like package manager, etc.



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