Robin Milner of ML is the most prominent example I know. One of the two Turing award winners without a Ph. D (the other being Floyd.) He introduced polymorphic

Robin Milner of ML is the most prominent example I know. One of the two Turing award winners without a Ph. D (the other being Floyd.) He introduced polymorphic type inference to a full-blown programming language - this is the most jaw-dropping language feature I have seen to date: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Milner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Milner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_inference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_inference