I don't think this is exclusive to famous programming language people. Anyone that is a read by a large number of people can do somehing similar.

There seems to be a pattern where someone famous/smart mention something rare/obscure/unknown and then more and more people look into it before it reaches some critical mass and become mainstream.

In the programming language world Haskell and Erlang seems to be examples of this, but that may because of my ignorance.