21 Feb
2017
21 Feb
'17
10:16 a.m.
Linus had the qualities of being a good programmer, a
good architect,
and a good manager. I've never seen all 3 in a person before or since.
No comment about Linus, but Vic Vyssotsky is my pick for the title.
He created the first dataflow language (in 1960!). He invented
bit-parallel flow analysis and put it into Fortran 2 years later.
He was one of the technical triumvirs for Multics. Ran several
big development groups at Bell Labs, and was 2 levels up from
the Unix team in Research. I could go on and on. What he
didn't do was publish; he got ahead on pure innate ability
and brilliant insight--a profound influence on almost all]
the original Unix crowd.
Doug