Perhaps you are aware of who Alan Kay, Bret Victor, Ian etc are, but... anyway, I just wanted to chip in with some context for those who are not aware. Alan Kay led the creation and development of Smalltalk at Xerox PARC, thus creating the first real GUI introducing all the UX elements we today take for granted (windows, buttons etc - yes, the same that Steve Jobs got a demo of), establishing OOP (some would argue Simula was first, but Smalltalk took it 10x further) and much, much more. So his legacy in the world of computing is... legendary I would argue, just google him.
Now, Ian has done truly brilliant VM JIT work in the Smalltalk community and I suspect that Ian did a lot of the DSL related stuff in STEPS, like the TCPIP stack etc.
So this is not just some "random folks" :) and.. some of the most brilliant work comes when you are really not sure where you are going. The original Smalltalk work that gave us OOP and modern GUIs came from Alan's life long task of making computers usable by children in order to amplify education. Most would argue we are still struggling with that task ;) but at least we got a lot of other things out of it!
Now, Ian has done truly brilliant VM JIT work in the Smalltalk community and I suspect that Ian did a lot of the DSL related stuff in STEPS, like the TCPIP stack etc.
So this is not just some "random folks" :) and.. some of the most brilliant work comes when you are really not sure where you are going. The original Smalltalk work that gave us OOP and modern GUIs came from Alan's life long task of making computers usable by children in order to amplify education. Most would argue we are still struggling with that task ;) but at least we got a lot of other things out of it!