I was wondering on something. Famous programming language people like Larry have the power to call attention in a subtle way upon something he or she thinks is important.

For example, suppose that Larry thinks the Stirling numbers are useful. He adds a little hidden feature to the builtin bind so when it's called with an extra argument, it stores the Stirling number indexed by the socket address to the extra arg. He adds one or two lines to the perldoc. People read the perldoc and start wondering what Stirling numbers are. They look them up, decide it's not what they need. They might not even remember later why they looked Stirling numbers up in the first place. But later, when Stirling numbers are actually needed, lots of people will have heared about it, and as they see that others have heared about it too, they think it might be important.

As far as I know, perl's bind doesn't do Stirling numbers, but I swear I first heared of the Bessell function from the manual of bc documenting its standard library (which is small: it has exp, log, sin, cos, atan2, and some bessell function). Later I've met Bessell-functions used once in an actual proof, and another times in a book. Then there's this wierd matrix-or operation which I haven't really seen used yet, but I keep wondering because both Iverson and Knuth have short references to it in documentation. Also, I'd probably have dismissed call-cc as just another silly abstraction functional programmers play with has it not been added to R5RS. And there must be other examples I can't even remember.

So, definers of future popular programming languages, use your powers wisely.

Did anyone have an experience similar to this?

(This is a lightly rewritten version of a rant I typed in the CB this morning.)

Update 2011-11-09: xkcd://591 is slightly related: it shows how to use this power as a weapon.

Update 2012-04-09: Irregular Webcomic strip 2635 (from 2010) also illustrates the concept well.

In reply to A power of famous programmers by ambrus

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