> Honestly it is the first time in my life that I hear the association computer science - Switzerland..
Some names you might recognize:
* Niklaus Wirth (Pascal, Modula-II, Oberon etc.; retired professor at ETHZ)
* Jurg Gutknecht (Oberon; EHTZ)
* Erich Gamma (one of the "Gang of Four" behind the Design Patterns book; co-wrote JUnit; studied at University of Zurich)
* Urs Hölzle (Google SVP of Technical Infrastructure at Google; studied at ETHZ)
A lot of people can also be traced back to Wirth. E.g. Andreas Gal that did his thesis on trace trees for JIT compilation is German, and did his thesis at UC Irvine, but his advisor was professor Michael Franz who did his thesis on runtime code generation before Java was released under Niklaus Wirth.
Already submitted a link to the original paper. Actually, Andrew Straw is for the last two years in Freiburg, Germany. A portion of his work was done also here, not only in Vienna, as the article cites.
> A lot of people can also be traced back to Wirth.
Martin Odersky, the creator of Scala and javac, was born in Germany but received his PhD in Zurich, at EHTZ, under Wirth's supervision[1]. Odersky is now a professor in Lausanne at EPFL [2].
AIUI, Anders Fogh has collaborated with people at TU Graz on various occasions previously: I'd assume they already knew about his work prior to the blog post.
He was influenced by Gandhi, among other people. Gandhi had done a lot of work on appropriate technology, like on charkhas (hand-operated spinning wheels), khadi (indigenous handloom cotton fabrics), in India, with a view to self-sufficiency of the people, apart from (but also related to) his more well known work on the non-violent feeedom movement which resulted in India's independence from Britain.
Such work started decades ago. If people research what has been done in their fields in the past, they can sometimes avoid rediscovering or reinventing a lot of wheels.
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