The Strange Case of the Danish Aarhus Mafia
Tags: random
Published: 2020-12-09 15:46:36

---
title: The Strange Case of the Danish Aarhus Mafia
published: true
description: Why are so many CS pioneers from Denmark?
tags: Random
slug: danish-mafia
canonical_url: https://www.swyx.io/danish-mafia
cover_image: https://miro.medium.com/max/3840/1*K4ufvkEE_s3i-FUAMH0Vng.jpeg
---

There's something sublime in the state of Denmark.

It is a tiny country (5.8m population today - the same size as Singapore where I am from) but it has had an abnormally large impact on computer science and therefore the world. Here is a selection of Danish programming language and compiler pioneers (in no particular order):

- **[Bjarne Stroustrup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjarne_Stroustrup)**: Creator of C++
- **[Rasmus Lerdorf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf)**: Coauthor of PHP
- **[Anders Hejlsberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg)**: Creator of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, J++, C#, TypeScript
- **[Mads Tofte](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mads_Tofte)**: Coauthor of Standard ML
- **[Peter Naur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Naur)**: of [the Backus-Naur form](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_form) and ALGOL 60
- **[Per Brinch Hansen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_Brinch_Hansen)**: created Concurrent Pascal
- **[Poul-Henning Kamp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul-Henning_Kamp)**: creator of MD5crypt, malloc, Varnish, and others
- **[David Heinemeier Hansson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson)**: creator of Ruby on Rails
- **[Lars and Jens Rasmussen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_developer))**: creators of Google Maps
- **[Lars Bak and Kasper Lund](https://blog.creandum.com/the-next-big-computing-platform-is-toit-a461e1e7a5a5)**: coauthors of V8 (Chrome, Node.js, MongoDB), and Dart/Flutter.

I also of course have had the privilege of working for [Mathias Biilmann and Christian Bach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netlify), both from Denmark.

Many were born in Copenhagen, Denmark's capital and biggest city, but [Brian LeRoux notes](https://twitter.com/brianleroux/status/1336651506783686659?s=20) that many of the [JVM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_virtual_machine) team were from [Aarhus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarhus). [Lars and Kasper's V8 team of about 70 was sited in Aarhus](https://blog.creandum.com/the-next-big-computing-platform-is-toit-a461e1e7a5a5). Bjarne, the Rasmussen brothers, and the V8 duo are actually from [Aarhus University](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarhus_University), though there is decent representation from other Danish universities too.

Anders, the overachiever of the group, speculates: "[Could it be because the winters and long and dark and there are no mountains to go ski, so you might as well design programming languages?](https://twitter.com/ahejlsberg/status/1135686367034322944)". This is of course a joke, but I won't lie and say I didn't have a peek to see what neighboring countries (Finland - Linus Torvalds, Norway - Håkon Wium Lie) did. The lowlands "no mountains" thesis is perhaps important, so I also checked out the Netherlands (Guido van Rossum, Bert Bos, Edsger Dijkstra).

I find it interesting that [the Lego Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego) is also from Denmark. 

**It's like the Danes are obsessed with giving the world basic building blocks.**