I find it a bit weird that the top comment in this story fawns over several star programmers, but ignores the guy who actually wrote the tool that the story is about.
Those are the greats today, and with a talent pool like that it's likely that many future greats will be created there. You have to do more than write good code to be legendary.
Maybe Facebook might end up being the Xerox PARC of our modern times.
There was a time at Xerox PARC when you couldn't throw a book without hitting someone who was or would become an important pioneer.
I'm not trying to discredit what Facebook is doing, or the people there, but it'll take time to build up to that level of talent. Having a few remarkable individuals is a great start. Having an entire department filled with them is going to be hard work.
Nothing compares to Bell Labs. Google is an amazing software and networking company, however the majority of its contributions are in the field of Computer Science, specifically in distributed computing and networking.
Bell Labs made significant contributions to Physics (solid-state and optics), Chemistry, Electronics, Computer Science (operating systems, graphics, speech recognition, networking), Materials Science, Communications (here they pretty much invented an entire field of study) and the design of so many everyday things (they had an entire team that focused on just the design of your telephone wire) that is would be impossible to imagine what the world would be like if they didn't exist.
If Google didn't exist, search would still have been solved, maybe a decade or so later. If Claude Shannon didn't work at Bell Labs when he did, it could well be the case that we wouldn't have come up with such an elegant theory of Information even today, and therefore the world would look nothing as it does.
