Another interesting thing: virtually all the really high-level programmers I know have either a PL or OS background. Jeff Dean worked on Cecil. Urs Hoezle worked on Self. Lars Bak worked on Beta, Self, and HotSpot. Peter Norvig worked on Lisp. Many of the other senior guys at Google - the ones who actually understand how all the search engine works, that people go to when there's a tough problem - worked on languages like Dylan, Python, and HotSpot.

Most of them aren't working on languages now, but there's this blip in the past of a surprisingly large number of them. I wonder if it's causation or correlation.