Introduction
This is an extremely incomplete list of individuals who have been important in the history of computer programming for some reason. The list is subjective and I always welcome suggestions for additions to the list.
I’ve added * where the people listed are women. Unfortunately, the contributions of women to computer science have been vastly underrecognized.
The List (Alphabetical)
- Frances E. Allen*
- Paul Allen – Co-founder of Microsoft, led development of MS-DOS.
- Jeff Atwood – Authors the popular Coding Horror blog, co-founder of Stackoverflow and Discourse.
- William Atkinson – Wrote HyperCard.
- John Backus – Led team that created FORTRAN, developed Backus-Naur form.
- Tim Berners-Lee – Invented World Wide Web (WWW).
- Kathleen Booth* – Inventor of first assembly language.
- Fred Brooks – Author of The Mythical Man-Month.
- Sergey Brin – Co-founder of Google.
- Howard Bromberg – Led a team that created COBOL.
- Vannevar Bush – created the Memex concept.
- Vint Cerf – co-creator of the TCP/IP protocols.
- Alonzo Church – invented lambda calculus.
- Edgar F. Codd – father of relational databases.
- Bram Cohen – Author of BitTorrent.
- Ward Cunningham.
- Dave Cutler – Led development of Win NT.
- Ole-John Dahl – A co-author of Simula.
- Edsger Dijkstra – Wrote “GO TO Considered Harmful” for Communications of the ACM.
- Brendan Eich – Author of JavaScript.
- Douglas Engelbart – Pioneer in Human-Computer Interaction, co-inventor of the mouse.
- Bill Gates – Co-founder of Microsoft, led development of MS-DOS.
- James Gosling – Author of Oak, a predecessor to Java.
- Susan L. Graham*
- Jim Gray
- Margaret Hamilton*
- Ander Hejlsberg – Authored Turbo Pascal, architected Delphi and C#. Currently employed by Microsoft and works on TypeScript as well as continuing work on C#.
- Grace Hopper* – Wrote FLOW-MATIC, a language using less mathematics and more English.
- Miguel de Icaza – Started Gnome, Mono, and Xamarin.
- Kenneth Iverson – Wrote A Programming Language – first a book, then an actual language (APL).
- John Kemeny – A co-author of BASIC.
- Alan Kay – Co-founder of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), creator of modern Graphical User Interface (GUI) concept, worked at Xerox PARC, numerous other significant contributions.
- Gary Kildall – Wrote CP/M, “the first commercially successful operating system for microcomputers…”
- Donald Knuth – Author of The Art of Programming, created TeX.
- Geoffrey Hinton – Key figure in Artificial Intelligence.
- C. A. R. Hoare
- Thomas Kurtz – A co-author of BASIC.
- Leslie Lamport – Created LaTeX, important algorithms.
- Barbara Liskov* – Originator of the Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP).
- Ada Lovelace* – Often credited with writing the first computer program.
- John McCarthy – Author of LISP (functional programming language).
- Cleve Moler – Authored MATLAB.
- Satoshi Nakamoto – Pseudonymous originator of blockchain and its most famous incarnation, BitCoin.
- Kristen Nygaard – A co-author of Simula.
- Alan Perlis – Co-inventor of ALGOL.
- Radia Perlman – Invented the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP).
- Mitchel Resnick – Led development of Scratch.
- Dennis Ritchie – Co-author of UNIX, led a team that authored C.
- Jean E. Sammet* – First female president of ACM, created FORMAC.
- Claude Shannon – Wrote The Mathematical Theory of Computation outlining how computers and people could communicate. Founded Information Theory.
- Joel Spolsky – Co-founded Stackoverflow, popular blogger on coding topics.
- Richard Stallman – Founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and wrote numerous applications that are used in Linux.
- Michael Stonebraker
- Bjarne Stroustrup – Author of the book The C++ Programming Language, founder of C++.
- Kenneth Thompson – Co-author of UNIX, created Go.
- Linus Torvalds – Author of Linux, Git.
- Alan Turing
- Larry Wall – Wrote Perl.
- Niklaus Wirth – Author of Pascal, Oberon, and Modula-2. Also contributor to Algol 60.
- Stephen Wolfram – Wrote Mathematica.
- Phil Zimmerman – Author of PGP.
- Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook.
- Konrad Zuse – Wrote Plan Calculus, the “first algorithmic programming language.”
Bibliography
- Computer History. Software & Languages.
- Biography. Computer Programmers.