Many years ago I organized a morning panel at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. The topic of my panel was what software tools people preferred to used to create their computer graphics.
My three invited panelists were all great pioneers in the field: Jim Blinn, Craig Reynolds and Tom Duff. As it happened, each at the time was strongly associated with a particular set of software tools, and they had all been using their very different toolsets to create amazing work.
Back then Jim did everything in FORTRAN — one of the oldest of computer languages. Craig worked in LISP, which is very different from FORTRAN in every way. Tom was known as one of the great creators of UNIX tools.
At the breakfast before the panel, I asked each of them what they thought was the best programming language. Not surprisingly, Jim said that you really don’t need anything other than FORTRAN. Craig said that LISP was the most powerful language for computer graphics.
I was expecting Tom to speak up for UNIX tools, so I wasn’t prepared for what came next. “A graduate student,” Tom replied, “is the highest level programming language.”
Shortly after that I quit my job in industry to become a professor at NYU, and I never looked back. To this day, I still don’t know whether that life decision was influenced by what Tom Duff told me over breakfast.