I greatly admire Niklaus Wirth (although not as a guru or role model as such).
Wirth created Pascal, then Modula-2 and then Oberon. He's 84 and has a career that stretches back to Algol in the 1960s. He has gained enormous insight into the design of programming languages and compilers.
He has always strived for simplicity in compiler and language design, but without sacrificing power and expressiveness. When he created Oberon, he created a language specification that was a mere 16 pages! That language was then used to build an entire operating system.
He lamented over 20 years ago that as hardware gets faster, software gets slower. A statement that still rings true today for many programs.
Anything Wirth writes or speaks about is worth reading (even if you find much to disagree). But is anyone listening to what he has to say?
"The wealth of features of many languages is indeed a problem rather than a solution. A multitude of features is another consequence of the programmers' belief that the value of a language is proportional to the quantity of its features and facilities, bells and whistles.
However, we know that it is better if each basic concept is represented by a single, designated language construct. Not only does this reduce the effort of learning, but it reduces the volume of the language's description and thereby the possibilities of inconsistency and of misunderstanding.
Keeping a language as simple and as regular as possible has always been a guideline in my work; the description of Pascal took some 50 pages, that of Modula 40, and Oberon's a mere 16 pages. This I still consider to have been genuine progress."
From a 1997 interview: http://www.eptacom.net/pubblicazioni/pub_eng/wirth.html