ZDNet (Jan. 10) – The mystery over where programming language aficionado Chris Lattner would head after ending his stint at Apple lasted mere hours, with Tesla announcing his recruitment as vice president of autopilot software. At Apple, Lattner was responsible for the creation and stewardship of the Swift programming language and the Clang compiler front-end that sits atop the LLVM compiler that Lattner co-created at Illinois. Also: TechCrunch (Jan. 10), Fortune (Jan. 10), Recode (Jan. 10), The Verge (Jan. 10), Financial Times (Jan. 10), CleanTechnica (Jan. 11), MacRumors (Jan. 10), Reuters (Jan. 10), BGR (Jan. 11), Seeking Alpha (Jan. 11), Gadgets 360 (Jan. 11).
Related story: Wired (Jan. 13) – Chris Lattner, who’s moving from Apple to Tesla, doesn’t enjoy the name recognition of a Tim Cook or a Jony Ive, but the Illinois alumnus is a rock star among software engineers. “Chris is really good at managing and running a large software project, with very high quality, attracting really good programmers and getting results,” says Vikram Adve, a computer science professor at Illinois.