I would also argue that it's quite hard to determine from a Wikipedia article if a person were a good programmer at the time of creating a certain thing about 40 years ago.
If my memory serves me correctly, Leslie Lamport [1] created TeX because he wanted to write a book on math but there were no good systems to write math, so he made TeX. So to me, it sounds like he were a math teacher at that time, I have no idea if he actually knew programming when starting to work on TeX.
Your memory doesn't serve you correctly! Most parts of your post are factually incorrect...
Lamport didn't make TeX. It was Don Knuth. Lamport wrote the LaTeX macros for TeX to simplify typesetting books and articles.
> I would also argue that it's quite hard to determine from a Wikipedia article if a person were a good programmer at the time of creating a certain thing about 40 years ago.
Ironically, the informative and relevant article you linked does answer this:
Leslie Lamport was a computer scientist from 1970 to 1985. He released LaTex in 1984. So he was a full time computer scientist for more than 14 years before LaTeX. This (plus of course his subsequent career including winning the Turing Award) suggests he was a "good programmer" for most common usages of "good" and "programmer".
Lamport was only a math teacher (at Marlboro College) from 1965 to 1969, 15 years before LaTeX. He was a computer scientist for his entire post-PhD career.
