The article suggests he is not a full-time employee of Facebook.

I'm not an employee of Facebook.

Thanks. Otherwise no D language could exists.

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.

I'm not sure you know who Walter Bright is. He's done a...few...things.

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.

I think compare Facebook to Xerox PARC is same as compare Google to Bell Labs.

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.

How long had Bell been around before the Labs came to be a force to reckon with? How about Xerox with PARC?

Facebook has been around very little time by those standards, and Google only slightly longer.

Time will tell if Facebook, Google and Microsoft can live up to their contemporaries.