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Nice thesis.

He's wrong.

The super-programmer that I'll hold up is Jeff Dean (see http://research.google.com/people/jeff/ for some of what he has done) and the task that I'll hold up is coming up with new standards and abstractions for creating scaleable software.

Sure, it is possible to break any one of the things he has done down into simple components. As a random example look at any of the many blog posts that discuss how MapReduce works and how to implement it yourself. (Heck, he had to do so when he turned his ideas into running software.) But could you have come up with those ways to think about problems? I am sure that I could not.




MapReduce is a simple realization that what we were doing in functional programming 20+ years before was useful in systems programming. Actually, "simple" isn't "easy" here, and MapReduce great realization so they deserve all the praise they get. But there was a lot of groundwork in place already.


A great number of advances in math and computer science can be recognized as someone taking techniques developed in one area and recognizing how they can apply to different area of programming. MapReduce is clearly one of these, and they were quite clear where they pulled inspiration from.

However Jeff Dean was the source of a number of insights which were utterly essential to Google's managing to scale. Only some of these have been widely disseminated outside of Google.

Once lightning has struck enough times in one place, you can rule out coincidence. It is clear that intellectual lightning keeps striking at a place named Jeff Dean. And the fact that it does is part of what makes him such a great programmer.


I would give Sanjay some credit also...and probably many others. Google has a great formula, but let's not get carried away; there are a lot of smart guys in systems who are very good at what they do. But super programmers is just a bit too condescending, I don't think any of them would appreciate that label.


Jeff Dean is famously modest, and undoubtably would resist the label "super programmer" in the same way that Terry Tao resists the label "math prodigy".

That doesn't mean that the label does not fit.

And no, he doesn't work in a vacuum. On the other hand, I think that he deserves the praise that I just heaped on him.


A great number of advances in math and computer science can be recognized as someone taking techniques developed in one area and recognizing how they can apply to different area of programming.

You probably already know this, but your insight isn't unique to programming. Virtually all fields progress this way, and Steven Berlin Johnson wrote Where Good Ideas Come From, which is substantially about how, where, and why this kind of borrowing takes place.




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