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.
The List (Alphabetical)
- 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 – Author of FORTRAN.
- Sergey Brin – Co-founder of Google.
- Howard Bromberg – Led a team that created COBOL.
- 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.
- Bill Gates – Co-founder of Microsoft, led development of MS-DOS.
- James Gosling – Author of Oak, a predecessor to Java.
- 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.
- Gary Kildall – Wrote CP/M, “the first commercially successful operating system for microcomputers…”
- Thomas Kurtz – A co-author of BASIC.
- Ada Lovelace – Often credited with writing the first computer program.
- John McCarthy – Author of LISP.
- Cleve Moler – Authored MATLAB.
- Kristen Nygard – A co-author of Simula.
- Mitchel Resnick – Led development of Scratch.
- Dennis Ritchie – Co-author of UNIX, led a team that authored C.
- Claude Shannon – Wrote The Mathematical Theory of Computation outlining how computers and people could communicate.
- 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.
- Bjarne Stroustrup – Author of the book The C++ Programming Language, founder of C++.
- Kenneth Thompson – Co-author of UNIX.
- Linus Torvald – Author of Linux, Git.
- Larry Wall – Wrote Perl.
- Niklaus Wirth – Author of Pascal, 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.