> I would also add "Dahl" for Simula, McCarthy for Lisp, Grace Hopper for Cobol for bringing in innovative ideas and the Standard ML folks as another example f

> I would also add "Dahl" for Simula, McCarthy for Lisp, Grace Hopper for Cobol for bringing in innovative ideas and the Standard ML folks as another example for tayloring a great mix of concepts. I agree (maybe excepting Cobol), but sadly McCarthy, Millner, Dahl and Hopper are no longer fall under the category of great living programming language designers. > some people did revolutionize language design, others had a talent of remixing existing concepts to something that was really useful and and a programming language that's comfortable (Rossum and Wirth would fall under that category for example) Yes, I think to qualify as a great language designer you either have to be really good at "UX", without necessarily contributing major conceptual breakthroughs (like van Rossum or Hejlsberg) or come up with something original and valuable. I'm pretty sure Stroustrup is not that good at UX (the C++ edit-compile-debug cycle is almost singularly miserable) and I'm not quite sure about the original and valuable part either.