Guy Steele & Gerry Sussman

Imagine a world in which two people take the best ideas from programming languages, and create an interpreter for their own programming language. Then they demonstrate that most of the features in that programming language—indeed, in all programming languages—can be constructed out of just three features of their interpreter: lambda application, conditional execution, and variable assignment. Then, they show that variable assignment is the wrong way to think about variable assignment, and show that their interpreter points to the most efficient way to make language compilers, and made a compiler for their interpreted language to show how good that could be. Then, imagine that they share this knowledge with the world, for free, through a series of memos.