Computer science and programming doesn't seem to have a popularizer, like many other sciences did: Carl Sagan or Neil de Grasse Tyson for Astrophysics, Steven Pinker for Linguistics (whether you like the person or not), Bertrand Russel for Mathematics and Philosophy, etc. But there is so much fun stuff to tell and show. Does anyone know someone or some place that comes close to such a goal?

This is an interesting observation, closest folks I can think of are Tim Berners-Lee, Ted Nelson, Alan Kay, etc. But they're definitely something other than the pop-science, “thought-leader” character and are known for specific work, or ideas.

Computerphile on YouTube. Same producer or whatever as Numberphile and a couple other channels IIRC. Not terribly famous, but definitely in the space you're looking for.

IMO there's a distinction between folks like Tyson or Piker, who get lots of speaking events, media coverage and whos income is reliant on maintaining a public presence of some form -> vs people such as Noam Chomsky, or Hawking, who may engage in lots of public discourse but have primarily worked within their fields for most of their lives. I've heard people refer to this distinction as one of “thought leader” vs “public intellectual” I feel there's more of the second category in computing, but they're still relatively niche and I don't know any that regularly engage with society at large.

If you want a charismatic personality, I think Tom Scott could do the job (he does do some CS content on Numberphile and his own channel), but based on his YouTube output he doesn't feel like specializing to that degree. Edit: Grant Sanderson/3Blue1Brown also occasionally does related work at a very high quality.

It's almost as if there's more a network of popularisers: YouTubers, authors, filmmakers, or public speakers, addressing their own part of a massive space -> the web, ML, game/system design, sociological analysis, interesting mathematics, etc. it's kinda all messy and spread out. @Andrew F defo has some good recommendations, I'd add TwoMinutePapers and Sebastian Lague, along with all the great smaller creators putting in tons of work to present technical ideas in an engaging (and ) way.

Thanks for the suggestions so far! I was thinking of Tim Berners-Lee and Alan Kay. Berners-Lee might be recognizable, at least in name, but he is not a great explainer or popularizer. Kay is much better in this regard, but never reached a wider audience. The ones who come to mind are Herbert Simon and Allen Newell, but they went much further than CS. The YouTubers are interesting, and possibly the closest we have in CS to a Carl Sagan, I am afraid.

I wouldn't hold my breath. The most widely popular ones are for fields like astronomy and physics where you can feel awe and wonder without much effort. Pop math exists, but is less popular, and still in inverse proportion to how much effort is needed to appreciate it. An astronomer can just put up a slideshow of cool pictures. Any interesting applications of CS tend to require a lot of effort to appreciate, and/or be too abstract or too niche to catch lay interest. This is in no small part due to the state of the ecosystem, which obviously a lot of people here are working on fixing. E.g. cool visualizations are nice but tend to be obviously toys, raw coding in mainstream languages is hard to follow, lambda calculus can be beautiful but demands a lot of effort even from pros, etc. Where it's not mind-bendingly hard there's a bunch of accidental complexity. I suspect linking CS concepts with problems that people intuitively understand is key, ideally with concrete results/outputs, that don't feel too artificial. A program format that lay people can grok would also be great, but I think if people can link the explanation of the code or whatever with the problem or other question, then they'll take it for granted and come back for more. Perhaps a platform that let you livecode a non-trivial game, maybe even a webapp, or some demo that made theoretical CS feel more practical than just moving symbols around. Honestly there probably exist people who could do the game thing in Love2D or something, but I don't know if lay people could follow. Live music coding is a (niche) thing, but I don't know how far you could take that in popularizing CS concepts beyond loops. I'm kind of obsessing over live demos here, which is probably not the only way to do it. However, I do think interaction is the best way to make CS feel computational, showing multiple runs and changes to the program, and if the common scenario is "speaking engagement", well, there you go, you're doing it live. :)

I think one obstacle in the way of someone becoming a Carl Sagan of CS is that CS is still, relatively speaking, in its infancy. Physics and Maths have hundreds and hundreds of years of history, a cohesive story and a sense of foundational understanding. As Alan Kay says (or at least I think he says)... the closest thing we have to a fundamental CS law is LISP. Turing equivalence and all that.

In the 80s it was Douglas Hofstadter, particularly _Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid._

I am somewhere between Steve Jobs and Donald Knuth

Coming back to GEB in recently, it reads a lot like a blog to me now. 😮 Also I use this https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/438362340894581027/DFD65476747C2F86CE04304BDDB67ADE7985292B/ reference to GEB as the lock screen image for my iPad.

Maybe one reason why there is not much of a market for popularization is the ubiquity of selling. All those people crying "my tech is the best and greatest" leave little room in attention space for popularizing more fundamental aspects of computing.

No one Mentioned Bret Victor? he even has a talk about this (the humane representation of thought). Dijkstra and his diaries held much insight into this problem and how little it has changed over the years ( if someone is interested in a list of EWDs and my notes I can share some of those). The Submarine analogy still says something. Computers are a an artifact of technology. The meta patterns of interaction are sometimes called culture. So are you @Denny Vrandečić looking for a person or a culture? As most of our cultural patterns go they emphasize context, after all we are physical human beings. If mathematics and the platonic realm draw us in draw our attention who then we would need to find the right balance between the world of numbers and the world ( and human experience!) that lies beyond! So here we are ended in a meta physical discussion. You talk about "so much fun stuff to tell and show" but maybe we also need to listen sometimes and that increases the chance of having a better conversation. (I hoped to express a hopeful,positive, affirmative yet balanced viewpoint I hope some of these intentions or feelings got across)

I was thinking of Bret Victor, but he is not popular in a mainstream way, almost nobody is, which is perhaps because computational thinking is not particularly accessible? We have our internal legends, like Bret Victor, Knuth. No many make it to mainstream figures thought, except the business people, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates. I picked Steve Jobs coz he has the "bicycle of the mind" comment for computers, which I think is very good at making the point of the computer understood by people not necessarily in the inner circle of computational thinking.