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Comment by w-m | Hacker News Reader

There's a whole generation of programming language creators born in the early to mid 1950s. In no particular order: Guido van Rossum (Python), Bjarne Stroustrup (C++), James Gosling (Java), Rob Pike (Go), Larry Wall (Perl), Walter Bright (D).

Makes me wonder what kind of secret club they have going on..

Enjoy the retirement, Guido!

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> Makes me wonder what kind of secret club they have going on

It's no secret; they lived through the time where the computing power was outstripping people's ability to express ideas harnessing that power, and the world was ripe for more expressive languages that leaned harder on the CPU to convert them into action.

And, that's still true. ;) New languages are being invented, some haven't caught on yet.

Another environmental factor is the end of Moore's Law. As single-core performance plateaus, we'll probably see more "bare-metal" native languages like Rust and Zig for applications that don't have the latency budget for higher-level dynamic languages with runtimes. We also see languages with good concurrency support like Erlang and Go become popular as applications need to become more multi-threaded to use multiple cores effectively.

A few others born in the 1950s that immediately come to mind: Martin Odersky (Scala), Guy Steele (Scheme), Robert Gentleman (R), John Ousterhout (Tcl), and (sort of) Simon Peyton-Jones (Haskell).

And of course Richard Stallman (Emacs Lisp) and Joe Armstrong (Erlang).

Wow, I didn't know that John Ousterhout created TCL, come to think of it, I never thought about who was behind it.

I can only dream of a panel or a TED talk with those computing sages! (I guess they are all alive right)

This is pretty close! (Guido van Rossum, James Gosling, Larry Wall and Anders Hejlsberg) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csL8DLXGNlU

Wow,surprised to see this at a local meetup in Seattle. Thought it would be a kind of event for a much bigger venue.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21401656

Here you go:

https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2016/08/video-c-rust-d-and-go-pa...

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