There is a lot of good computer science, but the computer science community today is vastly larger than it was in the 1960s and 1970s when Dijkstra, Knuth, Wirth, and others became legends. There are so many subfields of CS, each with its own deep literature and legendary figures. It’s difficult to be a modern Dijkstra or Knuth due to these factors, though to be fair, it is an impressive feat for Dijkstra to be Dijkstra and for Knuth to be Knuth even in their heydays. It’s just easier to get famous in an upstart field compared to getting famous in a mature field.

I think there are two typical paths to widespread visibility across CS subfields: (1) publishing a widely-adopted textbook, and (2) writing commonly-used software. For example, many computer scientists know about Patterson and Hennessy due to their famous computer architecture textbooks, and many computer scientists know about people like Jeff Dean due to their software.

Reading more academically-oriented literature such as the ACM’s monthly periodical “Communications of the ACM” is also a good way to get acquainted with the latest developments of computer science.