Bill Wadge ruined my life! I stumbled upon his book on his language Lucid in the library when I was in grad school, and it opened up my eyes about different programming models. It inspired me to try making my own programming language and I’ve been doing it ever since!

Going on 10 years now, no sign of losing interest. Don’t read his book if you have an interest in the thing you’re doing; it’ll turn you into a compiler dev and you’ll never do your interest again.