[20240519]

I would add

Haskell - the rabbit hole to category theory and all the mad stuff Haskell people get into (compilers, proofs etc.)

Bitcoin - love or loath it, technically it is a marvel. At the time Bitcoin came out I was musing on the same problem but never could figure out how to avoid double spends and would never have come up with blockchain!

[tsimionescu]

Now that the blockchain itself is actually not novel, it was already a part of Git at the time of the Bitcoin white paper. The novel part, I believe, was the proof-of-work concept.

[kevindamm]

Even proof of work was not novel, there were proposals for fighting email spam with similar techniques. Bitcoin's fortune is combining the right pieces at the right time and getting sufficient buy-in to become relevant and more difficult to ignore.

[20240519]

Yes I take blockchain to mean proof of work (or proof in general) validating blocks such that you can track time to some extent in a system that cannot be sure of time because of being distributed and nodes not being trusted.

[roman-kashitsyn]

Haskell was one of my most important discoveries; it affected my thinking and approach to software engineering the most.

However, as I mentioned in the opening section, I deliberately removed programming languages from candidates for several reasons: 1. They received enough praise already. 2. My presentation would be very biased. 3. The article would be way too long.