So the inventors and maintainers of V8 and C are very bad language designers? I don't like either of those languages but those are aome pretty strong words.
Did any V8 people work on Go? And V8 is an implementation of an existing language, so that fits under "very good software engineer, very bad language designer". As for C, well, it's not a fantastic language. Not to mention, it's been 50 years since C was created, ignoring those 50 years of progress to build essentially C with GC is pretty poor language design.
Robert Griesemer worked on V8 and Ken Thompson invented C. V8 is obviously not a language, but it is a massive project to make it as obscenely fast as it is and used in as many places, which should give Griesemer some credibility. I personally don't like C, but everything is obvious in hindsight and it's used everywhere, so you gotta give some credit to Thompson as well.
