i agree! hamming even talks about this a bit in his talk
your chances of doing great research are slim if you're born in kenya in the 01940s, no matter how much drive and creativity you have, but that's not because 'research advances' have 'droughts', it's because you're not being allowed to do great research, even if plenty of research advances are happening out of your reach
(unless you're richard leakey)
that's what's happened to modern surgeons, nuclear engineers, aeronautical engineers, chemists, etc. the usa and eu today have mostly become the kenya of the 01940s, where only the occasional richard leakey is allowed to excel, and thus we have entered the so-called great stagnation
but restrictions are much looser in computer science than in most fields. we still have:
- oleg kiselyov (sxml, probabilistic programming, relational programming and thence the reasoned schemer, type checking as small-step abstract evaluation, tagless staged interpreters, stream processing without runtime overhead)
- dan bernstein (twisted edwards curves including curve25519, breaking aes with cache timing attacks, nacl, tweetnacl, qmail, salsa, poly1305, striking down usa export controls, organizing the pqc conferences)
- fabrice bellard (qemu, ffmpeg, tcc, lzexe, and bellard's formula, aside from nncp, which is deep learning)
- jeff dean and sanjay ghemawat (epi info, leveldb, tensorflow, bigtable, mapreduce, spanner, 'the google cluster architecture', lots of internal google stuff, and again a bunch of deep learning stuff)
- raph levien (io, advogato, the gnome canvas, libart)
- graydon hoare (monotone and thence git, rust), and
- rob pike (blit, utf-8, much of plan9, sawzall, and golang)
- wouter van oortmerssen (cube/sauerbraten, flatbuffers, amiga e, false and thus more or less the field of esolangs, lobster, bla with first-class environments, aardappel, fisheye quake)
your chances of doing great research are slim if you're born in kenya in the 01940s, no matter how much drive and creativity you have, but that's not because 'research advances' have 'droughts', it's because you're not being allowed to do great research, even if plenty of research advances are happening out of your reach
(unless you're richard leakey)
that's what's happened to modern surgeons, nuclear engineers, aeronautical engineers, chemists, etc. the usa and eu today have mostly become the kenya of the 01940s, where only the occasional richard leakey is allowed to excel, and thus we have entered the so-called great stagnation
but restrictions are much looser in computer science than in most fields. we still have:
- oleg kiselyov (sxml, probabilistic programming, relational programming and thence the reasoned schemer, type checking as small-step abstract evaluation, tagless staged interpreters, stream processing without runtime overhead)
- dan bernstein (twisted edwards curves including curve25519, breaking aes with cache timing attacks, nacl, tweetnacl, qmail, salsa, poly1305, striking down usa export controls, organizing the pqc conferences)
- fabrice bellard (qemu, ffmpeg, tcc, lzexe, and bellard's formula, aside from nncp, which is deep learning)
- jeff dean and sanjay ghemawat (epi info, leveldb, tensorflow, bigtable, mapreduce, spanner, 'the google cluster architecture', lots of internal google stuff, and again a bunch of deep learning stuff)
- raph levien (io, advogato, the gnome canvas, libart)
- graydon hoare (monotone and thence git, rust), and
- rob pike (blit, utf-8, much of plan9, sawzall, and golang)
- wouter van oortmerssen (cube/sauerbraten, flatbuffers, amiga e, false and thus more or less the field of esolangs, lobster, bla with first-class environments, aardappel, fisheye quake)
i've left out the people i personally know well