Meyer makes an important point that often gets lost: the null pointer predates Hoare. NIL existed in McCarthy's Lisp in 1959, six years before Hoare added null references to ALGOL W. The "mistake," if it was one, was already widespread.
What made Hoare's 2009 confession so impactful wasn't that he was solely responsible — it's that he was the first person with that level of authority to publicly say "this was wrong."
That's what gave Rust, Swift, and Kotlin permission to design around it.
A bit more than 50 years. Grace Hopper retired in 1966. It's true that Grace kept un-retiring, but the most crucial stuff is all before she retired. Invention of what we'd think of as a linker-loader (which Grace called a compiler) and of the broad concept of high level programming languages all happens in the 1950s.
What made Hoare's 2009 confession so impactful wasn't that he was solely responsible — it's that he was the first person with that level of authority to publicly say "this was wrong."
That's what gave Rust, Swift, and Kotlin permission to design around it.
We are all very lucky to have lived through the foundation of a new science and new engineering over the last 50 years.