20190506-unsung_heroes.txt
Unsung Heroes

The bards will not sing of this day.

After a couple days getting into ed and edbrowse, both of which are
about as useful for text editing and web browsing, respectively, as
Morse code is for aural communication. But it pointed me somehow to
Bram Moolenaar, a man that has had a profound effect on my life which
I've never realized until I found out he wrote vim. That's amazing. 

Tim Berners-Lee (less unsung), Anklesaria and McCahill, von Tetzchner,
Montulli and Rezac and Grobe, Andreesen and Bina, and so many more are
creators that I've only known by a part of their work impacting my
life and the lives of many others. When people think of computers,
people think of Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg. They were great
innovators, but so many software devs and creators are just not
recognized nearly as much. I confess most of the names above I had to
look up myself. It's amazing how much work and collaboration have come
about and advanced computer technology, and it's somewhat sad that so
many of the pioneers' names are unrecognized.

I think one of the most amazing things about the computer science
field is so many of those pioneers are still living, breathing people
that you could actually meet. Mathematicians have no hope of meeting
Descartes. Astronomers now can't shake Galileo's hand. But so many
computer pioneers are out there right now. It's amazing how many
everyday unsung heroes there are in the tech world now.