McCarthy thunk up a beautiful self-evaluating eval function for lambda calculus and wrote it down. (The page-long "Maxwell's equations".) Then he showed it to someone (I forget who) who said, "I can implement that." and did. Suddenly: LISP.
Same pattern with Smalltalk: Alan Kay thought it up and someone wrote a little VM in C and suddenly Smalltalk was a thing in the world.
McCarthy thunk up a beautiful self-evaluating eval function for lambda calculus and wrote it down. (The page-long "Maxwell's equations".) Then he showed it to someone (I forget who) who said, "I can implement that." and did. Suddenly: LISP.
Same pattern with Smalltalk: Alan Kay thought it up and someone wrote a little VM in C and suddenly Smalltalk was a thing in the world.