I was going to post something similar. That book is phenomenal. It's also very frank about many matters. For example, despite Gabriel being a major Lisp proponent, he concedes that contrary to his expectations (and what PG suggests in http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html) that Common Lisp with CLOS would provide a factor of 4 or 5 of productivity over C++, that in practice, for his team, it was only more like 30% (which meshes with with Fred Brooks' "No Silver Bullet" thesis).