Glad to see Matthias Felleisen's paper "On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages” mentioned right off the bat.

Shriram’s talk on the same is mentioned too—Shriram is a great guy and I’ve enjoyed all my interactions with him. He’s working on improving CS education. There’s a neat program called “Bootstrap” that he’s helped found that aims at teaching algebra with programming. The idea is that functional programming helps students grok important algebraic concepts. (Sorry if I slaughter the description.)

Anyway, I appreciate these people and their work. Cool stuff.

(Disclaimer: my advisor has had both Shriram and Matthias as advisors. I thought they were cool before starting my PhD though, so it’s genuine. :)