While programming isn’t my area of expertise (then again what is) I must admit I was glad to read that Peter Naur was honoured with a Turing Award for his contribution to computer science. He has done outstanding work with the Backus-Naur form and was one of the creators of the Algol 60 programming language.

Also Danes can be proud of scientists like Bjarne Stroustup who invented C++, the software engineer Anders Hejlsberg who co-designed Delphi and C#, Rasmus Lerdorf  who was the author of the first version of PHP, Mads Tofte for his work with Standard ML and so on. While most people haven’t heard about these people they have had a great impact on the stuff you can do with computers today.

Last year there was much fuzz about Ruby on Rails made by David Heinemeier Hansson of 37 signals. He was announced Hacker of the Year by Google/O’Reilly for a product that was released in December!

So what’s my point, really? Nothing much except that it seems that the public schools in Denmark do a decent job teaching kids. Besides that it seems that there’s no principal reason why the great programmers we have at TraceWorks shouldn’t be able to accomplish something extraordinary - after all we are standing on the shoulders of giants