[ponker]

You must be injecting crack directly into your frontal lobe if you think that the creator of the world's third most important programming language being asked an algorithms question (unlikely) and failing it (entirely possible) means that he's unqualified to do "foundational work."

I had a Nobel Prize winner as a physics professor in college who got three successive different wrong answers when attempting a freshman physics problem in office hours. That doesn't mean that physics isn't the right place for him to work.

[jrib]

> third most important programming language

not going to debate that, but I'm curious, what do you rank as #1 and #2?

[phkahler]

The tiobe index lists Java and C in those spots.

[webmaven]

> The tiobe index lists Java and C in those spots.

That list is ranking languages by current popularity, though, rather than 'importance'.

I'd define 'importance' as more along the lines of "amount of havoc created if all software written using that language were broken/deleted at once".

[govg]

Wouldn't languages like COBOL rank pretty highly because a lot of legacy banking systems are written in that?

[webmaven]

Yes, but frankly, C would still cause more havoc because even if the mainframes somehow continued to run, they would still be effectively inaccessible over any network.

[fermigier]

Python is number 2 now, according to https://www.techrepublic.com/article/python-overtakes-java-t... :)

We should not give too much importance to this, but the fact is that Python is now ranked consistently #1, #2 or #3 in sufficiently many rankings to consider it seriously.

[dkarlovi]

That's fair, I guess.