Erik Meyer, member of GHC design team and Haskell community, responsible for LINQ design bringing FP to the masses, reactive extensions in .NET which lead to the RX model adopted by Netflix, nowadays contributing back to Haskell at FB (if I am not mistaken).
Niklaus Wirth, creator of Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon, Oberon-2, Oberon-07. Helped Apple design Object Pascal for Mac OS and Lisa. Contributed feedback to Active Oberon and Component Pascal. Built single language workstations using the Modula and Oberon family of languages.
Hejlsberg probably is completely in a class of his own as a designer and architect/implementor of innovative spins on existing languages though.
Arhictect/implementor of IDE's (TurboPascal, Delphi, VS - all immensely influential).
If you haven't had the joy of programming in Delphi, you'll feel at home if you ever used VS/C#.. in Delphi 2.0 of the mid-90's.
Brendan Eich probably scores even higher on that scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Bak_(computer_programmer)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-we-thank-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Richards_(computer_sc...
Specifically, the backwards compatibility story of the standard library is a mess (all the different .NET Framework versions, or wait, do I mean .NET Standard, or WinRT, or...?) and the package manager (NuGet) is not very impressive.
I figure that the good stuff (the core language design and CLR) comes from Hejlsberg and his team, while the clunky stuff comes from the wider Windows teams at Microsoft.
Are there many people using C# for things other than Windows apps and cross-platform games? I get the impression that Java is still much bigger for cloud infrastructure, finance etc, but maybe I'm wrong.
C# is still massive for web/cloud development, including in finance.
Java had also its moments (mobile Java, ee java, Android/Google Java, or Microsoft J++ (which btw. Was also Anders doing). About Python I just say 2/3 and let us not start with JavaScript. Languages and class libraries evolve and adapt. Not always to the better but they do and should.
Whereas I've found with C# that even perfectly innocuous-looking functions would be mysteriously unavailable in Silverlight, say. It has been very hard to pick a C# library subset that's both portable and useful, and Microsoft seem to have taken an awfully long time to sort that out.
Unfortunately it looks like the original creator/designer was moved off the project and it seems like it has suffered from some internal political issues. Development is happening on it but it looks pretty slow.
TP 5.5 with objects was a really clunky object system though (designed by Apple, IIRC). Object slicing by default. Vtable pointer added on definition of first virtual method in object hierarchy, like C++. And to invoke a constructor on a new heap-allocated object, you had to pass it as an argument to New(), with this weird syntax - "New(myObjPtr, Init(...))". Delphi's object system was far superior.
See some examples: http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/biblio/ddj/Web...
However, it could only achieved because MS financed a redo of the compiler. Instead of keeping the original.
For some reason, the budget for a full professorship (not permanent, but only 1-year long) was meager, I think it was ~1,600 Euros for the whole year. As a consequence, the usual corrupted nominations didn't happen for this one, and I ended up being selected among one or two other candidates with a similar curriculum as mine (which, to be honest, wasn't particularly strong on Compilers stuff).
When I found out I was assigned that professorship, few weeks before the start of the course, I spent time preparing the material and studying a lot more, as I felt my preparation needed some beefing up.
The text book, the (in) famous Dragon book, was available only at 150 Euros, more than 4 times the average cost of a textbook back then, and it contained way too much information for that course. I then decided to create content specific for that course, and to release it with a creative commons license.
It was the first time in that University (year 2004) that a professor released content under Creative Commons, and that content was available online, and that it was free.
I might not have been the best professor on the planet, but I felt really proud of that. The beauty of internet is that, 14 or so years later, you can still find that content somewhere [0].
I gave hundreds of hours to teaching, only for pennies, and I'm still very grateful for that opportunity in my life.
End of the story (assuming you're curious now) is that two years later a proper budget was allocated, and of course I was not renewed. Someone with much more political clout and influence was selected, as it usually happens in Italy.
I decided that the academic world was not for me. I pursued a career in the private sector, and 2-3 years later I landed a job at Amazon Web Services, and left Italy. [1]
Ten years later, I know for sure that being an academic would have not made me happy. I would have not been able to stand the bureaucracy, or the defined and determined career path.
I wish, though, that I had the opportunity to teach someone a bit closer to my passions (e.g. Databases). That's a little regret left in me :)
[0]: http://www.lulu.com/shop/simone-brunozzi/dispense-lab-lingua...
[1]: http://brunozzi.com/2008/05/22/how-i-got-hired-by-amazon.com...
:)
