Dr. Dobb's - one of the most esteemed technical publications - just published an interview with our very own David Kranz the Father of Curl. The article asks David: What is the Architect's Role?
David is a great guy and like all founding fathers and mothers (e.g. James Gosling, Larry Wall, Dennis Ritchie, Grace Hopper) he is at once brilliant and humble. He'll be irritated that I called him "brilliant" and he will never admit to being the "Father of Curl" but he is both in my opinion. David was pivotal in the creation of Curl along with Michael Detouzos and Steve Ward and has sheparded its development over the course of more than a decade. As a result Curl is the most powerful RIA platform available today.
Check out the short interview with David Kranz at Dr. Dobb's. It's a great read!
Great to see David get that attention at Dobb's. Language inventors have been so important and are not household names ...
Forget GO, Rack-O has cards (Curl lacks cards, which come in the UNICON library .. but we will get there ...)
So Richard, I wanted to add to your list: MIT's Barbara Liskov and Bell Labs/U AZ's Ralph Griswold (SNOBOL and ICON) as well as Carl Sassenrath, Alan Kay, Steve Dekorte, Craig Chambers, Phillipe Roussel and Alain Colmerauer to name some of my favorites but not to neglect John McCarthy, John Backus, John Kemeny, Ken Iverson, Niklaus Wirth, Dahl, Nygaard, Stroustrup, Jean Ichbiah (Ada), Andrew Koenig (Snocone), Gert Smolka (Oz), Guido van Rossum, Matz Matsumoto, Chuck Moore, Walter Bright, David May, Bertrand Meyer, John Ousterhout, Mike Cowlishaw, Seymour Papert, Robin Milner, Forgy, Carl Hewitt, Martin Odersky, Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman and the team of Jaffar and Lassez. The latest team I watch: the Falcon team around Giancarlo Niccolai. My least known fave: ToonTalk's Ken Kahn. And I neglect the Lua team of Roberto Ierusalimschy, de Figueiredo, and Celes - and I may yet have neglected someone who's language has been such a cause of excitement for me over the years ... of all these our David Kranz, Carl Sassenrath, Alan Kay and Alain Colmerauer top my list .. and now I have to add Laurie Pratt or Converge .. and we risk forgetting the late Alan Robinson and the contributions of Kowalksi and David Warren (still active on the XSB project, I believe ) And there are all the people who do the leg work to keep langauges alive such as Kent Beck, Clint Jeffery, Roel Wuyts, Stéphane Ducasse,Peter van Roy, Steve Wampler and other folks known to us through tunes.org or lambda-the-ultimate.org.
Somewhere along Route 66 there should be a monument raised (I stumbled on such a monument to submarine crews somewhere near L.A.) And then there are the unsung systems, interpreter, compiler, compiler-compiler, specification, API, communications and hardware folk.
The modesty can be so striking, as I found in getting to know a late, great aviation innovator and competitor or a weekend spent with a famed medical researcher. These people are inspiring. And so many of the elderly are still so very active, often in new fields (not unlike Dick Feynman surely would have been.)
With the passing of Michael DeBakey, one of my teen heros, I think that only philosphers are less known than language inventors (think of Hilary Putnam in America or those rows of books on Tarot and astrology in your public library next to the spare few books by living philosphers .. and sometimes none at all...)
Then there is the French game of 'tarot' for 3 or 5 players with more than 52 cards ... ah, the things I miss in the age ... but Curl may yet bring games of Tarot and Rack-O to a web page near you! Not to mention Curl as the-future-of-the-philosphy-book ...
PS
I think Dave Hanson who worked on Snobol5 aka ICON is still active at Google
PPS
What!?! You've never played Rack-O