> really hard and long term software project
That’s kind of what I mean. He commits to projects and gets groups of people talking about them and interested.
Imagine how hard it was to convince everyone at apple to use his language - and how many other smart engineers projects were not chosen. It’s not even clear the engineering merits were there for that one.
The only other person I know of who has started and lead to maturity multiple massive and infrastructural software projects is Fabrice Bellard. I've never ran into him self promoting (podcasts, HN, etc), and yet his projects are widely used and foundational.
It seems to me like the evidence points to "if you tackle really hard, long term, and foundational software projects successfully, people will use it, regardless of your ability to self promote."
Fabrice is one of my examples. Walter Bright (who does spend effort on promotion). Anyone who works on the V8 compiler at Google, or query engine on Postgres who we have never heard of.
> It seems to me like the evidence points to "if you tackle really hard, long term, and foundational software projects successfully, people will use it,
That’s a common belief among engineers. If you have worked at a large company you know that’s just now how big efforts like switching from Objective-C to Swift get done.