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List of programmers
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This is a list of programmers notable for their contributions to software, either as original author or architect, or for later additions. All entries must already have associated articles. Some persons notable as computer scientists are included here because they work in program as well as research.
A
[edit]- Michael Abrash – program optimization and x86 assembly language
- Scott Adams – series of text adventures beginning in the late 1970s
- Tarn Adams – Dwarf Fortress
- Leonard Adleman – co-created RSA algorithm (being the A in that name), coined the term computer virus
- Alfred Aho – co-created AWK (being the A in that name), and main author of famous Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (Dragon book)
- Allan Alcorn – Pong
- Andrei Alexandrescu – author, expert on languages C++, D, and created the Loki library
- Frances Allen – optimizing compilers, program optimization, and parallel computing
- Paul Allen – Altair BASIC, Applesoft BASIC, cofounded Microsoft
- Eric Allman – sendmail, syslog
- Marc Andreessen – co-created Mosaic, cofounded Netscape
- Bruce Artwick – Microsoft Flight Simulator
- Jeremy Ashkenas – CoffeeScript programming language and Backbone.js
- Julian Assange – Surfraw, Rubberhose (file system), Strobe port scanner which influenced Nmap
- Bill Atkinson – QuickDraw, HyperCard
- Lennart Augustsson – languages (Lazy ML, Cayenne), compilers (HBC Haskell, parallel Haskell front end, Bluespec SystemVerilog early), LPMud pioneer, NetBSD device drivers
B
[edit]- Roland Carl Backhouse – computer program construction, algorithmic problem solving, ALGOL
- Adam Back – Hashcash
- John Backus – Fortran, BNF
- Lars Bak – virtual machine specialist
- Richard Bartle – MUD, with Roy Trubshaw, created MUDs
- Friedrich L. Bauer – Stack (data structure), Sequential Formula Translation, ALGOL, software engineering, Bauer–Fike theorem
- Kent Beck – created Extreme programming, cocreated JUnit
- Donald Becker – Linux Ethernet drivers, Beowulf clustering
- Brian Behlendorf – Apache HTTP Server, co-founder of The Apache Software Foundation
- Doug Bell – Dungeon Master series of video games
- Fabrice Bellard – created FFmpeg open codec library, QEMU virtualization tools
- Tim Berners-Lee – invented World Wide Web
- Daniel J. Bernstein – djbdns, qmail
- Pierre Bézier – Bézier curve, Bézier surface, Computer-aided manufacturing, UNISURF
- Eric Bina – cocreated Mosaic web browser
- Marc Blank – cocreated Zork
- Jim Blinn – Blinn–Phong reflection model
- Joshua Bloch – core Java language designer, lead the Java collections framework project
- Jonathan Blow – video games: Braid, The Witness
- Susan G. Bond – cocreated ALGOL 68-R
- Grady Booch – cocreated Unified Modeling Language
- Ed Boon – Mortal Kombat
- Alan H. Borning – human–computer interaction, object-oriented programming, constraint programming, programming languages, ThingLab
- Bert Bos – authored Argo web browser, co-authored Cascading Style Sheets
- Keith Bostic – nvi, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD
- Stephen R. Bourne – cocreated ALGOL 68C, created Bourne shell
- David Bradley – coder on the IBM PC project team who wrote the Control-Alt-Delete keyboard handler, embedded in all PC-compatible BIOSes
- Andrew Braybrook – video games Paradroid and Uridium
- Larry Breed – implementation of Iverson Notation (APL), co-developed APL\360, Scientific Time Sharing Corporation cofounder
- Jack Elton Bresenham – created Bresenham's line algorithm
- Dan Bricklin – cocreated VisiCalc, the first personal spreadsheet program
- Walter Bright – Digital Mars, First C++ compiler, authored D (programming language)
- Sergey Brin – cofounded Google Inc.
- Per Brinch Hansen (surname "Brinch Hansen") – RC 4000 multiprogramming system, operating system kernels, microkernels, monitors, concurrent programming, Concurrent Pascal, distributed computing & processes, parallel computing
- Richard Brodie – Microsoft Word
- Andries Brouwer – Hack, former maintainer of man pager, Linux kernel hacker
- Paul Buchheit – created Gmail
- Danielle Bunten Berry (Dani Bunten) – M.U.L.E., multiplayer video game and other noted video games
- Rod Burstall – languages COWSEL (renamed POP-1), POP-2, NPL, Hope; ACM SIGPLAN 2009 PL Achievement Award
- Vitalik Buterin – Ethereum
- Dries Buytaert – created Drupal
C
[edit]- Steve Capps – cocreated Macintosh and Newton
- John Carmack – first-person shooters Doom, Quake
- Edwin Catmull – co-founder of Pixar, Catmull–Rom spline, Catmull–Clark subdivision surface, texture mapping
- Vint Cerf – TCP/IP, NCP
- Timothy M. Chan – Chan's algorithm
- Donald D. Chamberlin – SQL
- David Chaum – blind signatures, International Association for Cryptologic Research, mix-net, electronic voting, Dining cryptographers protocol, privacy-enhancing technologies, and the godfather of digital currency
- Steve Chen – co-founder of YouTube, AVOS, and part of the PayPal Mafia
- Ward Christensen – wrote the first BBS (Bulletin Board System) system CBBS
- Edgar F. Codd – principal architect of relational model
- Bram Cohen – BitTorrent protocol design and implementation
- Alain Colmerauer – Prolog
- Richard W. Conway – compilers for CORC, CUPL, and PL/C; XCELL Factory Modelling System
- Alan Cooper – Visual Basic
- Fernando J. Corbató – Multics and Compatible Time-Sharing System
- Mike Cowlishaw – REXX and NetRexx, LEXX editor, image processing, decimal arithmetic packages
- Alan Cox – co-developed Linux kernel
- Brad Cox – Objective-C
- Mark Crispin – created IMAP, authored UW-IMAP, one of reference implementations of IMAP4
- William Crowther – Colossal Cave Adventure
- Ward Cunningham – created Wiki concept
- Dave Cutler – architected RSX-11M, OpenVMS, VAXELN, DEC MICA, Windows NT
- Doug Cutting – Apache Hadoop, Apache Lucene, Apache Nutch
D
[edit]- Ole-Johan Dahl – cocreated Simula, object-oriented programming
- Ryan Dahl – created Node.js
- Wei Dai – Crypto++ library, b-money, VMAC
- Terry A. Davis – developer of TempleOS
- Jeff Dean – Spanner, Bigtable, MapReduce, TensorFlow
- L. Peter Deutsch – Ghostscript, Assembler for PDP-1, XDS-940 timesharing system, QED original co-author
- Robert Dewar – IFIP WG 2.1 member, chairperson, ALGOL 68; AdaCore cofounder, president, CEO
- Edsger W. Dijkstra – contributions to ALGOL, Dijkstra's algorithm, Go To Statement Considered Harmful, IFIP WG 2.1 member
- Matt Dillon – programmed various software including DICE and DragonflyBSD
- Jack Dorsey – created Twitter
- Martin Dougiamas – creator and lead developed Moodle
- Adam Dunkels – authored Contiki operating system, the lwIP and uIP embedded TCP/IP stacks, invented protothreads
- Pavel Durov — co-founding of VK and Telegram
E
[edit]- Les Earnest – authored finger program
- Alan Edelman – Edelman's Law, stochastic operator, Interactive Supercomputing, Julia (programming language) cocreator, high performance computing, numerical computing
- Brendan Eich – created JavaScript
- Larry Ellison – co-created Oracle Database, cofounded Oracle Corporation
- Andrey Ershov – languages ALPHA, Rapira; first Soviet time-sharing system AIST-0, electronic publishing system RUBIN, multiprocessing workstation MRAMOR, IFIP WG 2.1 member, Aesthetics and the Human Factor in Programming
- Marc Ewing – created Red Hat Linux
F
[edit]- Scott Fahlman – created smiley face emoticon :-)
- Dan Farmer – created COPS and Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN) Security Scanners
- Steve Fawkner – created Warlords and Puzzle Quest
- Craig Federighi – NeXTSTEP and Apple senior vice president
- Stuart Feldman – created make, authored Fortran 77 compiler, part of original group that created Unix
- Lex Fridman – Artificial Intelligence Podcast now the Lex Fridmen Podcast
- David Filo – cocreated Yahoo!
- Hal Finney — helped Satoshi Nakamoto debug Bitcoin, reusable proof-of-work, and early developer of Pretty Good Privacy.
- Brad Fitzpatrick – created memcached, Livejournal and OpenID
- Andrew Fluegelman – author PC-Talk communications software; considered a cocreated shareware
- Scott Forstall – lead software developer during the creation of iOS for iPad and iPhone
- Martin Fowler – created the dependency injection pattern of software engineering, a form of inversion of control
- Brian Fox – created Bash, Readline, GNU Finger
G
[edit]- Elon Gasper – cofounded Bright Star Technology, patented realistic facial movements for in-game speech; HyperAnimator, Alphabet Blocks, etc.
- Bill Gates – Altair BASIC, cofounded Microsoft
- Jim Gettys – X Window System, HTTP/1.1, One Laptop per Child, Bufferbloat
- Steve Gibson – created SpinRite
- John Gilmore – GNU Debugger (GDB)
- Adele Goldberg – cocreated Smalltalk
- Ian Goldberg – Off-the-record messaging
- Ryan C. Gordon (a.k.a. Icculus) – Lokigames, ioquake3
- James Gosling – Java, Gosling Emacs, NeWS
- Bill Gosper – Macsyma, Lisp machine, hashlife, helped Donald Knuth on Vol.2 of The Art of Computer Programming (Semi-numerical algorithms)
- Paul Graham – Yahoo! Store, On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp
- John Graham-Cumming – authored POPFile, a Bayesian filter-based e-mail classifier
- Richard Greenblatt – Lisp machine, Incompatible Timesharing System, MacHack
- Brendan Gregg – eBPF, DTrace toolkit
- David Gries – The book The Science of Programming, Interference freedom, Member Emeritus, IFIP Working Group 2.3 on Programming Methodology
- Ralph Griswold – cocreated SNOBOL, created Icon (programming language)
- Robert Griesemer – cocreated Go
- Neil J. Gunther – authored Pretty Damn Quick (PDQ) performance modeling program
- Scott Guthrie (a.k.a. ScottGu) – ASP.NET creator
- Jürg Gutknecht – with Niklaus Wirth: Lilith computer; Modula-2, Oberon, Zonnon programming languages; Oberon operating system
- Andi Gutmans – cocreated PHP programming language
- Michael Guy – Phoenix, work on number theory, computer algebra, higher dimension polyhedra theory, ALGOL 68C; work with John Horton Conway
H
[edit]- Daniel Ha – cofounder and CEO of blog comment platform Disqus
- Nico Habermann – work on operating systems, software engineering, inter-process communication, process synchronization, deadlock avoidance, software verification, programming languages: ALGOL 60, BLISS, Pascal, Ada
- Jim Hall – started the FreeDOS project
- Margaret Hamilton – Director of Software Engineering Division of MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the space Apollo program
- Brian Harris – machine translation research, Canada's first computer-assisted translation course, natural translation theory, community interpreting (Critical Link)
- Donald Haderle – one of the first commercial RDBMSs the IBM Db2
- Juris Hartmanis – Computational complexity theory
- Eric Hehner – predicative programming, formal methods, quote notation, ALGOL
- David Heinemeier Hansson – created the Ruby on Rails framework for developing web applications
- Rebecca Heineman – authored Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate and Dragon Wars
- Gernot Heiser – operating system teaching, research, commercialising, Open Kernel Labs, OKL4, Wombat
- Anders Hejlsberg – Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, TypeScript
- Ted Henter – founded Henter-Joyce (now part of Freedom Scientific) created JAWS screen reader software for blind people
- Andy Hertzfeld – co-created Macintosh, cofounded General Magic, cofounded Eazel
- D. Richard Hipp – created SQLite
- C. A. R. Hoare – first implementation of quicksort, ALGOL 60 compiler, Communicating sequential processes
- Louis Hodes – Lisp, pattern recognition, logic programming, cancer research
- John Henry Holland – pioneer in what became known as genetic algorithms, developed Holland's schema theorem, Learning Classifier Systems
- Adrian Holovaty — Django (web framework)
- Allen Holub – author and public speaker, Agile Manifesto signatory
- Bri Holt – founder of Vidmeter and Engrade
- Grace Hopper – Harvard Mark I computer, FLOW-MATIC, COBOL
- Ben Horowitz – Netscape product manager and Opsware co-founder and CEO
- Paul Hudak – Haskell language design, textbooks on it and computer music
- Tom Hudson – 3D Studio, CAD-3D, DEGAS
- David A. Huffman – created the Huffman coding; a compression algorithm
- Roger Hui – co-authored J
- Dave Hyatt – co-authored Mozilla Firefox
- P. J. Hyett – cofounded GitHub
I
[edit]- Miguel de Icaza – GNOME project leader, initiated Mono project
- Jean Ichbiah – Ada (programming language)
- Roberto Ierusalimschy – Lua leading architect
- Dan Ingalls – cocreated Smalltalk and Bitblt
- Ross Ihaka – R (programming language)
- Geir Ivarsøy – cocreated Opera web browser
- Ken Iverson – APL, J
- Toru Iwatani – created Pac-Man
J
[edit]- Bo Jangeborg – ZX Spectrum games
- Paul Jardetzky – authored server program for the first webcam
- Rod Johnson – created Spring Framework, founded SpringSource
- Stephen C. Johnson – yacc
- Lynne Jolitz – 386BSD
- William Jolitz – 386BSD
- Bill Joy – BSD, csh, vi, cofounded Sun Microsystems
- Robert K. Jung – created ARJ
K
[edit]- Ted Kaehler – contributions to Smalltalk, Squeak, HyperCard
- Laxmikant Kale – Charm++
- Poul-Henning Kamp – MD5 password hash algorithm, FreeBSD GEOM and GBDE, part of UFS2, FreeBSD Jails, malloc and the Beerware license
- Mitch Kapor – Lotus 1-2-3, founded Lotus Development Corporation
- Jawed Karim – co-founded YouTube and part of the PayPal Mafia
- Andrej Karpathy - co-founded OpenAI, director of artificial intelligence at Tesla, coined the term "vibe coding"
- Michael Kass – Active contour model
- Phil Katz – created Zip (file format), authored PKZIP
- Alan Kay – Smalltalk, Dynabook, Object-oriented programming, Squeak
- Mel Kaye – LGP-30 and RPC-4000 machine code programmer at Royal McBee in the 1950s, famed as "Real Programmer" in the Story of Mel
- Stan Kelly-Bootle – Manchester Mark 1, The Devil's DP Dictionary
- John Kemeny – cocreated BASIC
- Brian Kernighan – cocreated AWK (being the K in that name), AMPL, and authored ditroff text-formatting tool
- Gary Kildall – CP/M, MP/M, BIOS, PL/M, also known for work on data-flow analysis, binary recompilers, multitasking operating systems, graphical user interfaces, disk caching, CD-ROM file system and data structures, early multi-media technologies, founded Digital Research (DRI)
- Spencer Kimball – GIMP, CockroachDB
- Tom Knight – Incompatible Timesharing System
- Jim Knopf – a.k.a. Jim Button, author PC-File flatfile database; cocreated shareware
- Donald E. Knuth – TeX, CWEB, Metafont, The Art of Computer Programming, Concrete Mathematics
- Andrew R. Koenig – co-authored books on C and C++ and former Project Editor of ISO/ANSI standards committee for C++
- Gennady Korotkevich - Competitive programmer, first to break the 3900 barrier on Codeforces
- Cornelis H. A. Koster – Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 68, ALGOL 68 transput
L
[edit]- Andre LaMothe – created XGameStation, one of world's first video game console development kits
- Leslie Lamport – LaTeX
- Butler Lampson – QED original co-author
- Peter Landin – ISWIM, J operator, SECD machine, off-side rule, syntactic sugar, ALGOL, IFIP WG 2.1 member
- Tom Lane – main author of libjpeg, major developer of PostgreSQL
- Sam Lantinga – created Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL)
- Dick Lathwell – codeveloped APL\360
- Tim Berners-Lee – inventor of the World Wide Web
- Chris Lattner – main author of LLVM project, Swift, Mojo (programming language), Clang, MLIR
- Samuel J. Leffler – BSD, FlexFAX, LibTIFF, FreeBSD Wireless Device Drivers
- Rasmus Lerdorf – original creator of PHP
- Xavier Leroy — OCaml and CompCert
- Michael Lesk – Lex
- Gordon Letwin – architected OS/2, authored High Performance File System (HPFS)
- Max Levchin – co-founder of PayPal
- Jochen Liedtke – microkernel operating systems Eumel, L3, L4
- Charles H. Lindsey – IFIP WG 2.1 member, Revised Report on ALGOL 68
- Håkon Wium Lie – co-authored Cascading Style Sheets
- Barbara Liskov – CLU (programming language), Argus (programming language), Liskov substitution principle
- Mike Little - co-authored WordPress
- Yanhong Annie Liu – programming languages, algorithms, program design, program optimization, software systems, optimizing, analysis, and transformations, intelligent systems, distributed computing, computer security, IFIP WG 2.1 member
- Ed Logg – Asteroids, Tetris, and other Atari video games
- Robert Love – Linux kernel developer
- Ada Lovelace – first programmer (of Charles Babbages' Analytical Engine)
- Al Lowe – created Leisure Suit Larry series
- David Luckham – Lisp, Automated theorem proving, Stanford Pascal Verifier, Complex event processing, Rational Software cofounder (Ada compiler)
- Hans Peter Luhn – hash-coding, linked list, searching and sorting binary tree
M
[edit]- Magnus Manske – MediaWiki and GENtle
- Khaled Mardam-Bey – created mIRC (Internet Relay Chat Client)
- Simon Marlow – Haskell developer, book author; co-developer: Glasgow Haskell Compiler, Haxl remote data access library
- Robert C. Martin – authored Clean Code, The Clean Coder, leader of Clean Code movement, signatory on the Agile Manifesto
- John Mashey – authored PWB shell, also called Mashey shell
- Yukihiro Matsumoto "Matz" – Ruby language
- Peter Mattis – GTK, GIMP
- Timothy C. May – Cypherpunks electronic mailing list, time-lock puzzle, Crypto Anarchist Manifesto
- Conor McBride – researches type theory, functional programming; cocreated Epigram (programming language) with James McKinna; member IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi
- John McCarthy – Lisp, ALGOL, IFIP WG 2.1 member, artificial intelligence
- Craig McClanahan – original author Jakarta Struts, architect of Tomcat Catalina servlet container
- Daniel D. McCracken – professor at City College and authored Guide to Algol Programming, Guide to Cobol Programming, Guide to Fortran Programming (1957)
- Scott A. McGregor – architect and development team lead of Microsoft Windows 1.0, co-authored X Window System version 11, and developed Cedar Viewers Windows System at Xerox PARC
- Douglas McIlroy – macros, pipes and filters, concept of software componentry, Unix tools (spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, tr, etc.)
- Marshall Kirk McKusick – Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), work on FFS, implemented soft updates
- Sid Meier – author, Civilization and Railroad Tycoon, cofounded MicroProse
- Ralph Merkle – Co-inventor of public key cryptography, Merkle tree, Merkle's puzzles, Merkle–Hellman knapsack cryptosystem, Merkle–Damgård construction
- Bertrand Meyer – Eiffel, Object-oriented Software Construction, design by contract
- Jude Milhon – founding member of the Cypherpunks
- Bob Miner – co-created Oracle Database, cofounded Oracle Corporation
- Jeff Minter – psychedelic, and often llama-related video games
- James G. Mitchell – WATFOR compiler, Mesa (programming language), Spring (operating system), ARM architecture
- Arvind Mithal – formal verification of large digital systems, developing dynamic dataflow architectures, parallel computing programming languages (Id, pH), compiling on parallel machines
- Petr Mitrichev – competitive programmer
- Cleve Moler – co-authored LINPACK, EISPACK, and MATLAB
- Lou Montulli – created Lynx browser, cookies, the blink tag, server push and client pull, HTTP proxying, HTTP over SSL, browser integration with animated GIFs, founding member of HTML working group at W3C
- Bram Moolenaar – authored text-editor Vim
- David A. Moon – Maclisp, ZetaLisp
- Charles H. Moore – created Forth language
- Roger Moore – co-developed APL\360, created IPSANET, cofounded I. P. Sharp Associates
- Matt Mullenweg – co-authored WordPress
- Boyd Munro – Australian developed GRASP, owns SDI, one of earliest software development companies
- Elon Musk – Zip2, X.com, OpenAI, and Grok
- Mike Muuss – authored ping, network tool to detect hosts
N
[edit]- Satoshi Nakamoto – Bitcoin and blockchain database
- Peter Naur (1928–2016) – Backus–Naur form (BNF), ALGOL 60, IFIP WG 2.1 member
- Fredrik Neij – cocreated The Pirate Bay
- Graham Nelson – created Inform authoring system for interactive fiction
- Greg Nelson (1953–2015) – satisfiability modulo theories, extended static checking, program verification, Modula-3 committee, Simplify theorem prover in ESC/Java
- Klára Dán von Neumann (1911–1963) – principal programmer for the MANIAC I
- Maurice Nivat (1937–2017) – theoretical computer science, Theoretical Computer Science journal, ALGOL, IFIP WG 2.1 member
- Peter Norton – programmed Norton Utilities
- Peter Norvig – books Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp
- Kristen Nygaard (1926–2002) – Simula, object-oriented programming
O
[edit]- Ed Oates – cocreated Oracle Database, cofounded Oracle Corporation
- Martin Odersky – Scala
- Peter O'Hearn – separation logic, bunched logic, Infer Static Analyzer
- Jarkko Oikarinen – created Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
- Travis Oliphant — NumPy, SciPy, Anaconda (Python distribution), Probabilistic programming
- Andrew and Philip Oliver, the Oliver Twins – many ZX Spectrum games including Dizzy
- John Ousterhout – created Tcl/Tk
P
[edit]- Keith Packard – X Window System
- Larry Page – cofounded Google, Inc.
- Alexey Pajitnov – created game Tetris on Electronika 60
- Seymour Papert – Logo (programming language)
- Tony Parisi – Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML)
- David Park (1935–1990) – first Lisp implementation, expert in fairness, program schemas, bisimulation in concurrent computing
- Mike Paterson – algorithms, analysis of algorithms (complexity)
- Tim Paterson – authored 86-DOS (QDOS)
- Bruce Perens – co-found of the Open Source Initiative and original author of BusyBox
- Alan Perlis – first successful compiler and co-developed ALGOL
- Markus Persson – created Minecraft
- Tim Peters – Timsort, CPython
- Jeffrey Peterson – key free and open-source software architect, created Quepasa
- Charles Petzold – authored many Microsoft Windows programming books
- Simon Peyton Jones – functional programming, Glasgow Haskell Compiler, C--
- Rob Pike – wrote first bitmapped window system for Unix, cocreated UTF-8 character encoding, authored text editor sam and programming environment acme, main author of Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, co-authored Go (programming language)
- Kent Pitman – technical contributor to the ANSI Common Lisp standard
- Robin Popplestone – COWSEL (renamed POP-1), POP-2, POP-11 languages, Poplog IDE; Freddy II robot
- Tom Preston-Werner – cofounded GitHub
R
[edit]- Theo de Raadt – founding member of NetBSD, founded OpenBSD and OpenSSH
- Brian Randell – ALGOL 60, software fault tolerance, dependability, pre-1950 history of computing hardware
- T. V. Raman – specializes in accessibility research (Emacspeak, ChromeVox (screen reader for Google Chrome)
- Jef Raskin – started the Macintosh project in Apple Computer, designed Canon Cat computer, developed Archy (The Humane Environment) program
- Eric S. Raymond – Open Source movement, authored fetchmail
- Hans Reiser – created ReiserFS file system
- John Resig – creator and lead developed jQuery JavaScript library
- Craig Reynolds – created boids computer graphics simulation
- John C. Reynolds – continuations, definitional interpreters, defunctionalization, Forsythe, Gedanken language, intersection types, polymorphic lambda calculus, relational parametricity, separation logic, ALGOL
- Reinder van de Riet – Editor: Europe of Data and Knowledge Engineering, COLOR-X event modeling language
- Dennis Ritchie – C, Unix, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Inferno
- Ron Rivest – cocreated RSA algorithm (being the R in that name). created RC4 and MD5
- John Romero – first-person shooters Doom, Quake
- Armin Ronacher — Flask (web framework)
- Ton Roosendaal – Blender
- Blake Ross – co-authored Mozilla Firefox
- Douglas T. Ross – Automatically Programmed Tools (APT), Computer-aided design, structured analysis and design technique, ALGOL X
- Guido van Rossum – Python
- Andy Rubin – Android (operating system)
- Philip Rubin – articulatory synthesis (ASY), sinewave synthesis (SWS), and HADES signal processing system.
- Jeff Rulifson – lead programmer on the NLS project
- Rusty Russell – created iptables for linux
- Steve Russell – first Lisp interpreter; original Spacewar! graphic video game
- Mark Russinovich – Sysinternals.com, Filemon, Regmon, Process Explorer, TCPView and RootkitRevealer
S
[edit]- Bob Sabiston – Rotoshop, interpolating rotoscope animation software
- Muni Sakya – Nepalese software
- Jean E. Sammet – FORMAC, COBOL
- Grant Sanderson – Manim a Python mathematical library for mathematical visualizations for his 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel
- Chris Sawyer – developed RollerCoaster Tycoon and the Transport Tycoon series
- David Sayre – one of the developers for Fortran and Coherent diffraction imaging
- Cher Scarlett – Apple, Webflow, Blizzard Entertainment, World Wide Technology, and USA Today
- Bob Scheifler – X Window System, Jini
- Isai Scheinberg – IBM engineer, founded PokerStars
- Bill Schelter – GNU Maxima, GNU Common Lisp
- John Scholes – Direct functions
- Randal L. Schwartz – Just another Perl hacker
- Adi Shamir – cocreated RSA algorithm (being the S in that name)
- Mike Shaver – founding member of Mozilla Organization
- Cliff Shaw – Information Processing Language (IPL), the first AI language
- Zed Shaw – wrote the Mongrel Web Server, for Ruby web applications
- Eric Schmidt – Lex and CEO of Google
- Emily Short – prolific writer of Interactive fiction and co-developed Inform version 7
- Jacek Sieka – developed DC++ an open-source, peer-to-peer file-sharing client
- Daniel Siewiorek – electronic design automation, reliability computing, context aware mobile computing, wearable computing, computer-aided design, rapid prototyping, fault tolerance
- Ken Silverman – created Duke Nukem 3D's graphics engine
- Charles Simonyi – Hungarian notation, Bravo (the first WYSIWYG text editor), Microsoft Word
- Colin Simpson – developed CircuitLogix simulation software
- Rich Skrenta – cofounded DMOZ
- David Canfield Smith – invented interface icons, programming by demonstration, developed graphical user interface, Xerox Star; Xerox PARC researcher, cofounded Dest Systems, Cognition
- Matthew Smith – ZX Spectrum games, including Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy
- Edward Snowden – American NSA contractor and whistleblower, co-developer of the Haven security app.
- Henry Spencer – C News, Regex
- Joel Spolsky – cofounded Fog Creek Software and Stack Overflow
- Quentin Stafford-Fraser – authored original VNC viewer, first Windows VNC server, client program for the first webcam
- Richard Stallman – Emacs, GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), GDB, founder and pioneer of GNU Project, terminal-independent I/O pioneer on Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), Lisp machine manual
- Guy L. Steele Jr. – Common Lisp, Scheme, Java, Emacs
- Alexander Stepanov – created Standard Template Library
- Michael Stonebraker – Ingres, Postgres, Vertica, Streambase, Illustra, VoltDB, SciDB
- Christopher Strachey – draughts playing program
- Ludvig Strigeus – created μTorrent, OpenTTD, ScummVM and the technology behind Spotify
- Bjarne Stroustrup – created C++
- Zeev Suraski – cocreated PHP language
- Gerald Jay Sussman – Scheme
- Bert Sutherland – computer graphics, Internet
- Ivan Sutherland – computer graphics: Sketchpad, Evans & Sutherland
- Herb Sutter – chair of ISO C++ standards committee and C++ expert
- Gottfrid Svartholm – cocreated The Pirate Bay
- Aaron Swartz – software developer, writer, Internet activist
- Tim Sweeney – The Unreal engine, UnrealScript, ZZT
T
[edit]- Amir Taaki – leading developer of Bitcoin project
- Andrew Tanenbaum – Minix
- Audrey "Autrijus" Tang – designed Pugs compiler–interpreter for Perl 6 (now Raku); Digital Affairs Minister, Taiwan 2022–2024
- Simon Tatham – Netwide Assembler (NASM), PuTTY
- Larry Tesler – the Smalltalk code browser, debugger and object inspector, and (with Tim Mott) the Gypsy word processor
- Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner – cocreated Opera web browser
- Avie Tevanian – authored Mach kernel
- Ken Thompson – mainly designed and authored Unix, Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, B and Bon languages (precursors of C), created UTF-8 character encoding, introduced regular expressions in QED and co-authored Go language
- Simon Thompson – functional programming research, textbooks; Cardano domain-specific languages: Marlowe
- Michael Tiemann – G++, GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)
- Linus Torvalds – original author and current maintainer of Linux kernel and created Git, a source code management system
- Andrew Tridgell – Samba, Rsync
- Roy Trubshaw – MUD – together with Richard Bartle, created MUDs
- Bob Truel – cofounded DMOZ
- Alan Turing – mathematician, computer scientist and cryptanalyst
- David Turner – SASL, Kent Recursive Calculator, Miranda, IFIP WG 2.1 member
V
[edit]- Wietse Venema – Postfix, Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN), TCP Wrapper
- Bernard Vauquois – pioneered computer science in France, machine translation (MT) theory and practice including Vauquois triangle, ALGOL 60
- Pat Villani – original author FreeDOS/DOS-C kernel, maintainer of defunct Linux for Windows 9x distribution
- Paul Vixie – BIND, Cron
- Patrick Volkerding – original author and current maintainer of Slackware Linux Distribution
W
[edit]- Eiiti Wada – ALGOL N, IFIP WG 2.1 member, Japanese Industrial Standards (JIS) X 0208, 0212, Happy Hacking Keyboard
- John Walker – cofounded Autodesk
- Larry Wall – Warp (1980s space-war game), rn, patch, Perl
- Bob Wallace – author PC-Write word processor; considered shareware cocreator
- Alexandr Wang — Scale AI and Meta's chief AI officer
- Chris Wanstrath – cofounded GitHub, created the Atom (text editor) and the Mustache template system
- John Warnock – created PostScript
- Robert Watson – FreeBSD network stack parallelism, TrustedBSD project and OpenBSM
- Joseph Henry Wegstein – ALGOL 58, ALGOL 60, IFIP WG 2.1 member, data processing technical standards, fingerprint analysis
- Pei-Yuan Wei – authored ViolaWWW, one of earliest graphical browsers
- Peter J. Weinberger – cocreated AWK (being the W in that name)
- Jim Weirich – created Rake, Builder, and RubyGems for Ruby; popular teacher and conference speaker
- Joseph Weizenbaum – created ELIZA
- David Wheeler – cocreated subroutine; designed WAKE; co-designed Tiny Encryption Algorithm, XTEA, Burrows–Wheeler transform
- Molly White – HubSpot; creator of Web3 Is Going Just Great
- Arthur Whitney – A+, K
- why the lucky stiff – created libraries and writing for Ruby, including quirky, popular Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby to teach programming
- Adriaan van Wijngaarden – Dutch pioneer; ARRA, ALGOL, IFIP WG 2.1 member
- Bruce Wilcox – created Computer Go, programmed NEMESIS Go Master
- Evan Williams – created and cofounded language Logo
- Roberta and Ken Williams – Sierra Entertainment, King's Quest, graphic adventure game
- Simon Willison — Django (web framework)
- Sophie Wilson – designed instruction set for Acorn RISC Machine, authored BBC BASIC
- Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn – Zcash
- Dave Winer – developed XML-RPC, Frontier scripting language
- Niklaus Wirth – ALGOL W, IFIP WG 2.1 member, Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon
- Stephen Wolfram – created Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram Language
- Don Woods – INTERCAL, Colossal Cave Adventure
- Philip Woodward – ambiguity function, sinc function, comb operator, rep operator, ALGOL 68-R
- Steve Wozniak – Breakout, Apple Integer BASIC, cofounded Apple Inc.
- Will Wright – created the Sim City series, cofounded Maxis
- William Wulf – BLISS system programming language + optimizing compiler, Hydra operating system, Tartan Laboratories
Y
[edit]- Jerry Yang – co-created Yahoo!
- Victor Yngve – authored first string processing language, COMIT
- Nobuo Yoneda – Yoneda lemma, Yoneda product, ALGOL, IFIP WG 2.1 member
Z
[edit]- Matei Zaharia – created Apache Spark
- Jamie Zawinski – Lucid Emacs, Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, XScreenSaver
- Phil Zimmermann – created encryption software PGP, the ZRTP protocol, and Zfone
- Mark Zuckerberg – created Facebook
See also
[edit]- List of computer scientists
- List of computer magazines and List of computer books
- List of computer science journals and List of software programming journals
- List of computing people
- List of members of the National Academy of Sciences (computer and information sciences)
- List of pioneers in computer science
- List of programming language researchers
- List of Russian programmers
- List of Turing Award laureates
- List of video game industry people (programming)
- Notable cypherpunks
List of programmers
View on Grokipediafrom Grokipedia
Introduction
Definition and Role of Programmers
A programmer is an individual who writes, tests, and maintains source code to enable computers and software systems to perform specific tasks.[2] This role has evolved from early algorithm designers, exemplified by Ada Lovelace, who is recognized as the first computer programmer for developing an algorithm for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine in the 1840s, to modern software engineers who build complex, scalable applications.[3] Key responsibilities of programmers include designing algorithms to address computational problems, debugging and optimizing code for efficiency, and collaborating on software projects to ensure functionality and reliability.[4] Daily tasks often involve writing modular functions, such as those in Python for scripting automation or in C++ for performance-critical systems like game engines.[5] Programmers also contribute to specialized domains, including artificial intelligence through coding machine learning frameworks and web development by creating dynamic user interfaces and backend services.[6] The skill set of programmers has transformed dramatically since the 1940s, when tasks centered on manual wiring and switch settings for computers like ENIAC, or punch card programming for other early systems, requiring precise hardware manipulation.[7] By 2025, practices have shifted to agile methodologies, which promote iterative sprints, continuous feedback, and adaptive planning to accelerate software delivery in dynamic environments.[8] Fundamental competencies like logical reasoning and problem-solving underpin these changes, enabling programmers to tackle increasingly abstract and interdisciplinary challenges.[4] Programmers drive societal progress by powering innovations in areas such as mobile applications that facilitate global communication and cloud computing that supports vast data ecosystems for businesses and individuals.[9] As of 2025, the worldwide developer population is approximately 47 million, highlighting the profession's scale and its pivotal role in fostering economic and technological expansion.[10]Historical Evolution
The foundations of programming trace back to the 19th century with Charles Babbage's conceptualization of the Analytical Engine in 1837, a mechanical general-purpose computer designed to execute complex calculations through punched cards representing algorithms.[11] This vision laid the groundwork for programmable computation, as Ada Lovelace expanded on it in 1843 by outlining the first algorithm intended for the machine to compute Bernoulli numbers, demonstrating the potential for computers to manipulate symbols beyond mere numerical processing.[12] These early ideas shifted theoretical mathematics toward practical computational methods, influencing subsequent developments in automated instruction execution. The mid-20th century marked the transition from mechanical concepts to electronic implementation, beginning with the unveiling of ENIAC in 1946, the first programmable general-purpose electronic digital computer, which used vacuum tubes to perform high-speed calculations for military applications.[13] This era saw the proliferation of electronic computers, culminating in the introduction of high-level programming languages that abstracted machine code, such as FORTRAN in 1957, which enabled scientists to write code in a more intuitive, formula-like syntax for numerical computations.[14] By the 1960s, these advancements facilitated broader adoption of computing in research and industry, establishing programming as a distinct discipline for developing software on increasingly sophisticated hardware. From the 1970s to the 1990s, programming evolved alongside the personal computing revolution and networked systems. Key milestones included the development of Unix in 1969, a multitasking operating system that influenced modern software architectures through its modular design and portability.[15] Languages like C, introduced in 1972, provided low-level control while supporting higher-level abstractions, powering systems such as Unix and enabling efficient software for emerging microcomputers.[16] The decade also witnessed the rise of internet protocols in the 1980s, followed by the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, which spurred programming for hypertext and distributed applications, transforming computing from isolated machines to interconnected ecosystems. Entering the 2000s, programming shifted toward collaborative, scalable, and specialized paradigms, driven by open-source movements, mobile devices, and artificial intelligence. Tools like Git, released in 2005, revolutionized version control by enabling distributed development for large-scale projects, such as the Linux kernel.[17] Cloud computing platforms, exemplified by the launch of Amazon Web Services in 2006, allowed programmers to deploy applications without managing physical infrastructure, accelerating innovations in web services and data processing.[18] By 2025, these trends have integrated AI frameworks into mainstream programming, with open-source repositories fostering global collaboration on machine learning models and mobile apps. Globally, the field has seen rapid diversification, particularly in Asia, where regions like South Asia, Greater China, and East Asia collectively contribute approximately 40% of the world's 47 million developers, reflecting investments in tech education and outsourcing hubs.[19]Pioneers in Computing
19th and Early 20th Century Contributors
The 19th and early 20th centuries marked the foundational era of programming concepts, where innovators laid the groundwork for algorithmic thinking and mechanical data processing without relying on electronic components. These pioneers focused on theoretical designs and mechanical devices that anticipated modern computing by emphasizing precise instructions, data representation, and automation of calculations. Their work centered on mechanical computation—using gears, levers, and punched media to execute algorithms—establishing core principles like step-by-step instruction sequences and symbolic manipulation that would later influence electronic systems. Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), often regarded as the first computer programmer, contributed significantly to the conceptualization of programming through her work on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer. In 1843, she authored extensive notes accompanying a translation of Luigi Federico Menabrea's article on the machine, including what is recognized as the world's first published algorithm intended for machine execution: a method to compute Bernoulli numbers using the Engine's operations. This algorithm, detailed in her Note G, involved a series of arithmetic steps—such as addition, subtraction, and looping—to generate the sequence up to the eighth Bernoulli number, demonstrating the Engine's capacity for complex, iterative processes. Lovelace's insights extended beyond mere calculation; she envisioned the machine's potential for creative applications, such as composing music through symbolic manipulation, highlighting programming's role in non-numerical tasks. Her notes, spanning over 20 pages, provided a blueprint for algorithm design, emphasizing the separation of hardware operations from abstract instructions. Konrad Zuse (1910–1995), a German engineer, advanced mechanical and early digital programming during the 1940s amid World War II constraints. He developed Plankalkül, the first high-level programming language, between 1942 and 1945, though it remained unpublished until 1972; this language introduced concepts like variables, loops, conditionals, and subroutines for expressing complex algorithms in a readable, abstract form, independent of specific hardware. Plankalkül's design prioritized hierarchical program structures and compound data types, enabling the specification of computations for tasks like chess-playing simulations. Concurrently, Zuse constructed the Z3 in 1941, the world's first functional, programmable digital computer using binary relays and electromechanical switches; it executed floating-point arithmetic and conditional branching via punched film instructions, allowing reprogramming for different calculations without mechanical reconfiguration. The Z3's reliance on pre-perforated 35mm film strips for input represented an early form of stored-program control in a mechanical-digital hybrid, performing approximately 3–4 additions per second for engineering problems like differential equations.[20] Herman Hollerith (1860–1929), an American engineer, pioneered data programming through mechanical tabulation systems that automated statistical analysis. For the 1890 U.S. Census, he invented the tabulating machine, which used punched cards—rectangular paper sheets with up to 80 columns of round holes—to encode demographic data such as age, gender, and occupation, enabling rapid mechanical reading and sorting. The system employed electrical contacts triggered by holes to increment counters on dials, reducing census processing time from over seven years (as in 1880) to just months and saving an estimated $5 million. Hollerith's machines integrated punching devices for data entry, sorters for categorization, and tabulators for aggregation, forming a complete electromechanical workflow that treated punched cards as a programmable medium for batch processing large datasets. In 1896, he founded the Tabulating Machine Company, which evolved through mergers into the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in 1924, commercializing these technologies for business and government applications. These mechanical innovations in algorithm design and data encoding provided essential precedents for mid-20th-century electronic programming by demonstrating the feasibility of instruction-based computation at scale.Mid-20th Century Innovators
The mid-20th century marked a pivotal shift in computing from theoretical foundations to practical electronic implementations, driven by wartime needs and post-war innovations that enabled programmable digital machines. Building on earlier mathematical concepts from the 19th and early 20th centuries, programmers during this period tackled the challenges of wiring and switch-based programming for massive vacuum-tube systems, laying the groundwork for modern software. Key figures advanced both hardware-software integration and the conceptualization of universal computation, with contributions centered around World War II code-breaking efforts and early stored-program designs. Alan Turing (1912–1954) provided foundational theoretical support for these developments through his 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem," which introduced the Turing machine as an abstract model of computation capable of simulating any algorithmic process on a tape-based system.[21] During World War II, Turing contributed to British code-breaking at Bletchley Park, where he designed electromechanical devices like the Bombe for Enigma decryption and developed statistical methods for cracking the Lorenz cipher, influencing the creation of the Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer used for large-scale cryptanalysis starting in 1943.[22] Post-war, Turing's ideas informed early computer designs, including proposals for the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) at the National Physical Laboratory, emphasizing stored programs and universal applicability.[23] John von Neumann (1903–1957) extended these concepts into practical architecture with his 1945 "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC," which outlined the stored-program paradigm where instructions and data share the same memory, enabling flexible reprogramming without hardware rewiring—a breakthrough that defined the von Neumann architecture still prevalent today.[24] In 1952, von Neumann oversaw the programming of the MANIAC I (Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer) at Los Alamos National Laboratory, using it to simulate thermonuclear reactions and complex physical systems through punched paper tape inputs, demonstrating the power of electronic digital computation for scientific applications.[25] His work bridged theoretical computation with engineering, influencing machines like the IAS computer at Princeton. The dedication of ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) on February 15, 1946, at the University of Pennsylvania symbolized this era's arrival, as the machine—completed in 1945 for U.S. Army ballistics calculations—represented the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, programmable via plugboards and switches to perform 5,000 additions per second.[26] Jean Jennings Bartik (1924–2011), one of six women selected as ENIAC programmers in 1945, played a crucial role in configuring the machine for diverse tasks, including trajectory computations, by mastering its complex wiring setups without formal documentation.[27] Bartik later contributed to software for the UNIVAC I in 1951, the first commercial stored-program computer, where she developed subroutines and tested programs for census and business applications, advancing the shift toward reusable code modules.[28] Grace Hopper (1906–1992) drove the transition from machine-specific coding to higher-level abstraction, inventing the A-0 system in 1952—the first compiler to translate symbolic instructions into machine code for the UNIVAC, reducing programming errors and time. Her efforts culminated in leading the development of COBOL in 1959, a business-oriented language using English-like syntax to make programming accessible beyond specialists, influencing data processing standards for decades. Hopper also popularized the term "debugging" following a 1947 incident on the Harvard Mark II, where a malfunction was traced to a moth trapped in a relay, which she taped into the logbook with the note "First actual case of bug being found."[29] These innovations marked the evolution from labor-intensive machine code to automated, human-readable programming, enabling broader adoption of computers in the post-war era.Programming Language Designers
Early and Procedural Languages
John Backus (1924–2007) was a pioneering computer scientist who led the development of FORTRAN at IBM, marking the advent of the first widely used, compiled high-level programming language.[30] In 1957, Backus assembled a team to create the IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System, known as FORTRAN, designed to simplify scientific and engineering computations on machines like the IBM 704 by translating mathematical formulas into efficient machine code.[31] This language introduced key procedural elements such as DO loops for iteration and arithmetic IF statements for conditional execution, enabling structured control flow that reduced reliance on low-level assembly programming and boosted productivity in numerical applications.[32] Backus's work extended to influencing international standards in programming languages, particularly through his contributions to ALGOL 58 and later revisions. ALGOL 58, formalized in 1958, emphasized procedural paradigms with features like block structures for modularity, allowing localized variable scopes and subroutine calls, alongside conditional statements and for-loops that promoted step-by-step algorithmic expression.[33] Backus's 1959 paper on syntax notation significantly shaped ALGOL's formal description, providing a metalanguage for defining language constructs that influenced subsequent procedural designs.[34] These innovations laid foundational principles for imperative programming, prioritizing sequential execution and reusability in early computing environments. Ken Thompson (born 1943) advanced procedural languages by creating the B programming language in 1969 while working at Bell Labs on the PDP-7 computer.[35] Derived from Martin Richards's BCPL, B served as an interpretive system-level language that supported procedural abstraction through functions and global declarations, facilitating the implementation of early Unix utilities with straightforward control structures like while loops and if conditionals.[36] Thompson's design emphasized efficiency for systems programming, bridging high-level readability with low-level performance needs during the late 1960s hardware constraints. Dennis Ritchie (1941–2011) built upon B to design the C programming language between 1971 and 1973 at Bell Labs, establishing it as a cornerstone for procedural system programming.[36] C introduced typed variables, pointers, and modular functions that enhanced data abstraction and code organization, with constructs such as for-loops, switch statements, and if-else conditionals enabling precise step-by-step control flow for portable software development.[37] In 1978, Ritchie co-authored The C Programming Language with Brian Kernighan, which standardized these procedural paradigms and became a definitive reference for teaching imperative programming principles.[38]Modern Paradigms
Bjarne Stroustrup (born 1950) is renowned for creating C++ in 1985 while at Bell Labs, extending the procedural foundations of C with object-oriented features such as classes for data abstraction and inheritance for code reuse and hierarchy building.[39][40] These additions allowed programmers to model complex systems more modularly without sacrificing C's performance and low-level control, marking a pivotal shift toward abstraction in systems programming.[40] Stroustrup also authored the seminal book The C++ Programming Language in 1985, serving as the definitive reference for the language's design and implementation.[41] James Gosling (born 1955) led the development of Java at Sun Microsystems, releasing it in 1995 as an object-oriented language optimized for platform independence through compilation to bytecode executed on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).[42] This design enabled "write once, run anywhere" portability, with the JVM handling hardware-specific details, while Java's support for applets facilitated early web-based interactive applications.[42] Gosling's innovations emphasized secure, robust code for networked environments, influencing enterprise and consumer software development.[42] Guido van Rossum (born 1956) designed Python, first releasing it in February 1991 at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands, with a philosophy centered on code readability and simplicity for scripting and general-purpose tasks.[43][44] Python's use of significant whitespace for indentation-based syntax enforces clean structure without delimiters like braces, reducing boilerplate and errors in rapid prototyping.[45] The language has evolved continuously, reaching version 3.14 on October 7, 2025, incorporating enhancements like improved error messages and performance optimizations while preserving its core readability.[46] These paradigms introduced key innovations that transformed programming practices. In object-oriented languages like C++ and Java, polymorphism enables objects of different classes to be treated uniformly through inheritance and virtual methods or interfaces, allowing flexible, extensible designs—such as runtime method overriding in C++ via virtual functions added in 1983.[40][42] Scripting languages like Python advanced dynamic typing, where variable types are determined at runtime rather than compile time, fostering concise code for automation and data processing without explicit declarations.[47]System Software Developers
Operating Systems Architects
Ken Thompson (born February 4, 1943) co-created the Unix operating system in 1969 at Bell Labs, initially implementing it in assembly language on a PDP-7 minicomputer before rewriting portions in the B programming language and later its successor, C, to enhance portability across hardware platforms.[48][35] His work on Unix pioneered multitasking through time-sharing mechanisms, allowing multiple processes to run concurrently, and introduced a hierarchical file system that organized data into directories and files, influencing countless subsequent operating systems.[49] Linus Torvalds (born December 28, 1969) developed the Linux kernel starting in 1991 as a free, open-source alternative to Unix, initially coding it in C for the Intel 80386 processor to run on personal computers.[50] He publicly released version 0.01 on September 17, 1991, and achieved version 1.0 on March 14, 1994, marking the kernel's first stable release capable of supporting a full Unix-like environment.[51] By June 2025, Linux powers 100% of the world's top 500 supercomputers, demonstrating its scalability for high-performance computing through modular kernel design and community-driven enhancements.[52] Andrew S. Tanenbaum (born March 16, 1944) authored the Minix operating system in 1987 primarily as an educational tool to illustrate operating system principles, implementing it entirely in the C programming language for clarity and portability.[53] Designed as a microkernel-based Unix-like system, Minix emphasized modularity by separating core services like process management from device drivers, directly inspiring the development of Linux and influencing modern microkernel architectures in systems like seL4.[54] In Unix-like operating systems, key architectural concepts include process scheduling, which uses algorithms such as multilevel feedback queues to allocate CPU time fairly among processes, ensuring efficient multitasking and responsiveness.[48] File systems, exemplified by Unix's inode-based structure, enable efficient storage and retrieval by associating metadata with data blocks, supporting features like permissions and symbolic links that underpin secure, hierarchical data organization.[49]Compilers and Development Tools
Gary Kildall (1942–1994) developed PL/M, a high-level programming language for microcomputers, along with its compiler in 1973 while working with Intel on tools for the 8008 and 8080 processors. This compiler enabled efficient code generation for early microcomputers and directly supported the creation of CP/M, the Control Program for Microcomputers, which Kildall prototyped in 1974 as the first operating system for the Intel Intellec-8 with floppy disk support. CP/M, written in PL/M, became a foundational platform for microcomputer software, running on thousands of systems by the early 1980s and establishing standards for portable development tools.[55][56] Brian Kernighan (born 1942) co-developed the AWK text-processing language in 1977 at Bell Labs with Alfred Aho and Peter Weinberger, providing a concise scripting tool for data extraction and reporting that integrated seamlessly with Unix pipelines. AWK's pattern-action paradigm influenced command-line automation and remains a staple for ad-hoc data manipulation in Unix-like environments. Kernighan also co-authored AMPL, a modeling language for mathematical programming, introduced in 1988 with Robert Fourer and David Gay to simplify formulation of optimization problems in linear, nonlinear, and integer programming. His work extended to broader Unix tool ecosystem contributions, including the underlying principles of build automation exemplified by the make utility, originally implemented in 1976 to manage dependencies and incremental compilation in software projects.[57][58][59][60] Fabrice Bellard (born 1972) created QEMU in 2003, an open-source emulator and virtualizer that supports hardware emulation for multiple architectures, enabling cross-platform development and testing without physical hardware. Building on this, Bellard developed the Tiny C Compiler (TCC) around 2005, a lightweight, fast C compiler heading toward full compliance with ISO C99 standards that compiles at speeds up to nine times faster than GCC on benchmarks like large codebases, prioritizing rapid prototyping and scripting-like use of C. TCC's small footprint and direct code generation without intermediate assembly make it suitable for embedded systems and quick iterations.[61][62] Key development tools from the 1970s laid groundwork for modern compilers: Lex, a lexical analyzer generator created in 1975 by Mike Lesk and Eric Schmidt at Bell Labs, automates tokenization from regular expressions into C code for scanner construction. Complementing it, Yacc (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler), developed in 1975 by Stephen C. Johnson, generates LALR parsers from context-free grammars, streamlining syntax analysis. These tools profoundly influenced subsequent systems, including the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), first released in 1987 by Richard Stallman as a free, portable C compiler that adopted parser generator concepts via Bison (a Yacc successor) to support multi-language compilation and optimization across architectures.[63][64]Internet and Web Innovators
Network Protocols Developers
Vinton Cerf (born 1943) and Robert Kahn (born 1938) co-designed the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite in 1974 while working at DARPA, providing the foundational architecture for interconnecting diverse packet-switched networks.[65][66] Cerf, in particular, implemented early versions of TCP for the ARPANET, which facilitated reliable packet switching and end-to-end data transmission across heterogeneous systems.[67] Their work, detailed in seminal papers and later standardized in RFC 791 (IP) and RFC 793 (TCP), enabled the scalable growth of what became the modern Internet. Paul Mockapetris (born 1948) invented the Domain Name System (DNS) in 1983 at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, addressing the limitations of numeric IP addresses by introducing a hierarchical, distributed naming scheme for resources on the Internet.[68] He authored RFC 1034, which outlines DNS concepts and facilities including domain name syntax and resource records, and RFC 1035, specifying implementation details such as query and response formats. This innovation allowed users to access hosts via memorable names like "example.com" rather than IP addresses, fundamentally simplifying Internet navigation and scalability.[69] Complementing TCP, Jon Postel developed the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) in 1980, as specified in RFC 768, to provide a lightweight, connectionless alternative for applications requiring low-latency transmission without TCP's overhead for reliability.[70] UDP's minimalistic design, featuring only basic checksums and port addressing, made it ideal for real-time services like streaming and DNS queries. By the 1990s, TCP/IP, DNS, and UDP had solidified as the core protocols forming the Internet's backbone, supporting the transition from research networks like ARPANET and NSFNET to a global commercial infrastructure.[71] These protocols were initially tested on early ARPANET hardware interfaces to ensure interoperability across diverse systems.Web Technologies Creators
Tim Berners-Lee (born June 8, 1955) is a British computer scientist who invented the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) between 1989 and 1991 while working as a software engineer at CERN.[72][73] These foundational technologies enabled the creation of the World Wide Web by allowing hypertext documents to be linked and transferred over the internet. In 1991, Berners-Lee launched the first website, info.cern.ch, which described the project itself and provided access to related resources.[72] He also developed Libwww, a modular library for web applications that implemented core web protocols and served as a basis for early browsers, starting its development in 1990.[74] Marc Andreessen (born July 9, 1971) is an American software engineer who led the development of the Mosaic web browser in 1993 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).[75][76] Mosaic was the first widely available browser to support inline images and graphical interfaces, making the web accessible to non-technical users and sparking its popular adoption. In 1994, Andreessen co-founded Netscape Communications and released Netscape Navigator, which built on Mosaic's code and further popularized graphical web browsing with enhanced features like frames and JavaScript support.[77][76] Lou Montulli (born 1970) is an American programmer who co-developed HTTP cookies in June 1994 while working at Netscape Communications.[78][79] Cookies provided a mechanism for maintaining state across HTTP requests, enabling persistent sessions, user tracking, and features like shopping carts on stateless web connections. Montulli invented the technology to solve e-commerce challenges, such as remembering user selections between page loads, during early Netscape development.[78] Håkon Wium Lie (born July 26, 1965) is a Norwegian web standards pioneer who proposed the concept of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in 1994 while at CERN, with the first specification (CSS Level 1) becoming a W3C recommendation in 1996.[80] CSS separated document structure (handled by HTML) from presentation, allowing developers to apply consistent styling like fonts, colors, and layouts across web pages. Lie collaborated with Bert Bos to evolve the standard, addressing the limitations of inline styling in early HTML and enabling more professional web design.[80][81]AI and Machine Learning Experts
Foundational AI Researchers
Foundational AI researchers were pioneering programmers who laid the groundwork for artificial intelligence in the mid-20th century by developing symbolic and logical systems on early computers, leveraging advances in computing hardware like vacuum-tube machines to simulate human-like reasoning. These efforts focused on rule-based approaches, theorem proving, and list manipulation, establishing AI as a distinct field separate from numerical computation. Mid-20th century innovations in programmable digital computers enabled these symbolic explorations, transforming theoretical ideas into executable programs. John McCarthy (1927–2011) was a key figure in AI's inception, co-organizing the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project where he coined the term "artificial intelligence" to describe machines simulating human intelligence. [82] As a programmer, McCarthy developed Lisp in 1958, the first functional programming language designed for AI applications, emphasizing list processing to handle symbolic expressions and recursive functions essential for logical reasoning tasks. [83] Lisp's garbage collection and higher-order functions influenced decades of AI software development, enabling programs to manipulate knowledge representations dynamically.[84] Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) contributed foundational hardware-software simulations of neural processes and institutional infrastructure for AI programming. In 1951, as an undergraduate at Harvard, Minsky programmed and built the SNARC (Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator), the first neural network machine using vacuum tubes to simulate probabilistic rat-like learning in navigating mazes, demonstrating early machine adaptation through reinforcement. [85] In 1959, Minsky co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Project (later the AI Laboratory) with John McCarthy, creating a hub for developing AI software on systems like the TX-0 computer, where he programmed early perceptrons and pattern recognition routines. [86] Allen Newell (1927–1997) and Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) collaborated on the Logic Theorist, the first AI program, implemented in 1956 on the JOHNNIAC computer at RAND Corporation. This system automated mathematical theorem proving by searching proof spaces using heuristic rules modeled after human problem-solving, successfully deriving 38 of the first 52 theorems in Principia Mathematica. [87] Their programming approach introduced means-ends analysis and list structures for representing logical expressions, proving 13 theorems independently and influencing subsequent AI search methods. [88] Key concepts from these researchers included search algorithms like minimax, adapted in the 1950s for game-playing AI to evaluate moves by minimizing maximum opponent gains in adversarial trees, as seen in early checkers and chess programs that balanced exhaustive exploration with computational limits. [89]Contemporary Machine Learning Pioneers
Contemporary machine learning has been profoundly shaped by a cadre of researchers who advanced neural network architectures and training techniques, enabling scalable empirical approaches to artificial intelligence. These pioneers, often collaborating across institutions, focused on deep architectures that leverage vast datasets and computational power, distinguishing their work from earlier symbolic methods by emphasizing statistical learning and optimization. Geoffrey Hinton, born in 1947, played a pivotal role in revitalizing neural networks through his contributions to learning algorithms. In 1986, he co-authored a seminal paper that popularized backpropagation, a gradient descent-based method for efficiently training multi-layer neural networks by propagating errors backward through the layers.[90] Earlier, Hinton co-developed Boltzmann machines in 1985, stochastic recurrent neural networks inspired by statistical physics that model probability distributions over binary vectors using energy-based learning.[91] His influence extended to deep learning's breakthrough era; in 2012, Hinton supervised the creation of AlexNet, a deep convolutional neural network that achieved top performance on the ImageNet large-scale visual recognition challenge, demonstrating the efficacy of deep architectures with dropout regularization and GPU acceleration.[92] Yann LeCun, born in 1960, pioneered convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which incorporate translation-invariant feature extraction through shared weights and subsampling. In 1989, he introduced a foundational CNN architecture in a paper on handwritten digit recognition, applying backpropagation to learn hierarchical representations from pixel data without hand-crafted features.[93] Building on this, LeCun implemented LeNet in 1998, a five-layer CNN deployed for real-world check-reading systems at AT&T, achieving over 99% accuracy on the MNIST dataset of handwritten digits through convolutional and pooling layers followed by fully connected classifiers.[94] Yoshua Bengio, born in 1964, advanced deep learning by integrating neural networks with natural language processing. In 2003, he proposed a neural probabilistic language model that learns distributed representations of words—now known as word embeddings—as dense vectors capturing semantic relationships, trained via maximum likelihood on sequences to predict subsequent words.[95] Bengio further solidified the field's foundations in 2016 as co-author of the comprehensive textbook Deep Learning, which systematized concepts from feedforward networks to optimization techniques, serving as a standard reference for practitioners and researchers.[96] In recognition of their pioneering work in deep learning, Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio were jointly awarded the 2018 ACM Turing Award.[97] Ian Goodfellow, born in 1987, revolutionized generative modeling with the invention of generative adversarial networks (GANs) in 2014. GANs pit a generator network against a discriminator in a minimax game, where the generator produces synthetic data to fool the discriminator, enabling unsupervised learning of complex data distributions like images without explicit likelihood maximization.[98] This framework has driven innovations in image synthesis, style transfer, and data augmentation, with the original formulation using multilayer perceptrons on datasets such as MNIST to demonstrate stable training under certain conditions.Game Developers
Early Video Game Programmers
Early video game programmers pioneered interactive entertainment on rudimentary computing hardware in the mid-20th century, overcoming severe constraints like limited memory and processing power to create engaging simulations using custom code. These innovators often worked in research or academic settings, leveraging oscilloscopes, minicomputers, and early personal systems to display simple graphics and handle user inputs, laying the groundwork for the industry despite hardware that could only manage basic real-time interactions.[99][100] William Higinbotham, an American physicist born in 1910 and deceased in 1994, developed Tennis for Two in 1958 at Brookhaven National Laboratory as an exhibit to demonstrate scientific capabilities to the public. Using a Donner Model 30 analog computer and a five-inch oscilloscope for display, Higinbotham simulated a side-view tennis match where players controlled paddles via analog joysticks, with a ball trajectory influenced by simulated gravity and spin—marking one of the earliest instances of interactive electronic gaming. The setup required manual wiring and potentiometers for input, reflecting the era's reliance on analog electronics rather than digital processing, and the game was dismantled after its brief exhibition in 1958 and 1959.[99][101] Steve Russell, born in 1937, created Spacewar! in 1962 while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, programming it in assembly language for the DEC PDP-1 minicomputer—the first commercial interactive computer. This two-player game featured dueling spaceships navigating a starfield, incorporating realistic physics such as gravitational pull from a central sun, collision detection, and thrust-based movement, all rendered on the PDP-1's CRT display using vector graphics. Russell and collaborators like Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen drew inspiration from science fiction, implementing real-time input handling through the PDP-1's custom control stations with joysticks and switches, which demanded efficient assembly code to achieve smooth 20 frames-per-second updates on hardware with just 4K words of memory. Spacewar! spread organically to other PDP-1 installations worldwide, influencing future game design without commercial intent.[100][102] Alexey Pajitnov, born in 1956, invented Tetris in 1984 while employed at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre in Moscow, coding it in Pascal for the Electronika 60—a Soviet clone of the PDP-11 minicomputer with limited graphical output via a terminal. The game introduced a novel block-matching mechanic where tetromino shapes fall and must be rotated and placed to complete horizontal lines, which clear for points, escalating in speed for escalating difficulty; Pajitnov drew from pentomino puzzles and aimed to test the system's capabilities. Initially shared via floppy disks within the USSR, Tetris exploded globally after licensing deals, with the Game Boy version selling over 35 million copies worldwide and becoming a cultural phenomenon by 1989 through ports to consoles and arcades.[103][104][105] Early implementations like Pajitnov's emphasized real-time input for piece control using keyboard arrows, processed in low-level code to fit within the Electronika 60's 64KB RAM constraints.[102][106]Modern Game Engine Developers
John Carmack (born August 20, 1970) is a prominent programmer renowned for his foundational work on reusable game engines at id Software. In 1993, he created the Doom engine, which employed raycasting to render pseudo-3D environments by casting rays from the player's viewpoint to determine wall distances and textures, enabling efficient performance on early 1990s hardware. This approach allowed for fast, seamless navigation through multi-level structures without full 3D polygon processing. Carmack's innovations in the Doom engine set a benchmark for scalable game architecture, influencing subsequent 3D titles. Carmack advanced engine technology further with the Quake engine released in 1996, which introduced true 3D polygonal rendering and support for hardware acceleration via APIs like Glide and Direct3D. The engine utilized binary space partitioning (BSP) trees to organize geometry for rapid visibility culling and front-to-back rendering, achieving smooth frame rates even on software-only systems while preparing for emerging 3D accelerators. These features enabled complex, fully navigable 3D worlds, marking a shift from 2.5D limitations to immersive, real-time 3D experiences. A key optimization in Carmack's work appeared in Quake III Arena (1999), where he implemented the fast inverse square root approximation in the engine's math library. This algorithm, found in the open-sourced Quake III code, computes an approximate value of 1/√x using bit-level manipulation and Newton's method, providing a fourfold speedup over standard floating-point square root operations for vector normalization in physics and lighting calculations. Such efficiencies were essential for real-time simulations of projectile trajectories, collision detection, and dynamic lighting in high-performance multiplayer environments. Tim Sweeney (born 1970) founded Epic Games in 1991 and spearheaded the development of the Unreal Engine, first released in 1998 alongside the game Unreal. Sweeney began prototyping the engine in 1995, integrating real-time 3D rendering with tools for level editing and asset management. The engine's architecture emphasized modularity, allowing developers to build expansive worlds with advanced visual effects like volumetric fog and texture animation. Central to Unreal Engine's flexibility was UnrealScript, a scripting language Sweeney designed from 1998 to 2014, inspired by Java and object-oriented paradigms. UnrealScript enabled high-level game logic implementation, such as AI behaviors and event handling, separate from low-level C++ code, fostering rapid iteration and community modding. This scripting system supported complex interactions in multiplayer scenarios, contributing to the engine's adoption in titles like Unreal Tournament. Modern game engines like those from Carmack and Sweeney incorporate sophisticated physics simulation and cross-platform rendering as core features. For instance, optimizations like the fast inverse square root facilitate accurate vector computations in physics engines for realistic collisions and movements. Unreal Engine's rendering pipeline, with its hardware abstraction layers, ensures consistent visuals across platforms including PC, consoles, and mobile, leveraging scalable graphics APIs for broad compatibility. These elements have enabled reusable frameworks that power contemporary 3D games, emphasizing performance and accessibility.Open Source Leaders
Core Infrastructure Contributors
Richard Stallman (born 1953) founded the GNU Project in 1983 to develop a free Unix-like operating system, emphasizing user freedoms in software.[107][108] He created the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), with its first public release in 1987, which became a cornerstone for compiling free software across platforms.[64] Additionally, Stallman developed GNU Emacs in 1984, a highly extensible text editor that remains widely used for programming and documentation in open source environments.[109] Alan Cox (born 1968) made significant contributions to the Linux kernel starting in the 1990s, focusing on stability and performance enhancements.[110] He maintained the Linux kernel's 2.2 series, releasing stable updates like 2.2.22 with security fixes, and played a key role in the development of the 2.4 series by integrating symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support and refining networking code.[111][112] Cox's work on networking features, including improvements to TCP/IP stack scalability, enabled better handling of high-throughput connections in early Linux distributions.[111] Rob McCool developed the original NCSA HTTPd server in 1993, which served as the foundation for the Apache HTTP Server launched in 1995 by a group of developers patching and extending his code.[113] The Apache HTTP Server has since become a vital piece of open source infrastructure, powering approximately 25.0% of all known websites as of November 2025.[114]Frameworks and Libraries Creators
David Heinemeier Hansson (born 1979) created Ruby on Rails in 2004 as an open-source web application framework written in the Ruby programming language, designed to facilitate the development of database-backed web applications through its model-view-controller architecture.[115] The framework emphasizes the principle of convention over configuration, which reduces the need for explicit setup by assuming sensible defaults and naming conventions, thereby accelerating development workflows for web apps.[116] Rails was initially extracted from the code base of Basecamp, a project management tool developed by 37signals (now Basecamp), which launched in 2004 and demonstrated the framework's ability to enable quick iteration on real-world applications.[117] Evan You (born 1987) developed Vue.js in 2014 as a progressive JavaScript framework for building user interfaces, focusing on simplicity and flexibility to allow incremental adoption from a library to a full-featured framework.[118] A key innovation in Vue.js is its support for reactive user interfaces, where changes in JavaScript state automatically trigger efficient updates to the DOM without manual intervention, enhancing performance in dynamic web applications.[118] The framework's single-file components, which encapsulate HTML templates, JavaScript logic, and CSS styles in.vue files, have been widely adopted for their modularity; for instance, Alibaba integrated Vue.js into its front-end architecture to improve development speed and maintainability across its e-commerce platforms.[119][120]
Jordan Walke (born 1984) invented React in 2013 while working as a software engineer at Facebook, introducing it as an open-source JavaScript library for constructing interactive user interfaces through a component-based approach.[121] Central to React's design is the virtual DOM, a lightweight in-memory representation of the real DOM that enables efficient rendering by computing minimal updates (diffing) only for changed elements, significantly reducing browser reflows and repaints in complex applications.[121] This innovation addressed performance challenges in large-scale UIs at Facebook, paving the way for React's adoption in high-traffic environments.
These frameworks and libraries have collectively boosted rapid prototyping in web development by providing reusable, high-level abstractions that prioritize developer productivity and maintainability; for example, Ruby on Rails powered the swift creation of Basecamp in 2004, setting a precedent for agile software delivery in startups and enterprises.[116][117]
