Li Haoyi

Li Haoyi is the man who by his own efforts lifted the whole Scala ecosystem.

The most important thing to learn from him is his strive for simple, minimal but “just right” abstractions, as in his castor library, and the wisdom of just “porting” well-designed and battle-tested APIs and proper abstractions from Python.

By being principle-guided and by focusing on “just right” abstractions and minimalism he managed to become immensely productive by writing less.

He also has a very precise and concise writing style, and he wrote an advanced book, based on what he is doing.

He can be legitimately compared to John Carmack in his striving to do everything just right, attention to details and productivity.

Again, programming is about just right abstractions, not the code per se, and this fundamental principle has been well-researched and taught in 70s and 80s by Barbara Liskov and her CLU language, which, unlike Java, has most of things right.