30 Most Influential People In Programming
Earlier in the month we released a post called 30 Most Influential People In Web Design which showcased our favorite 30 web designers. Today we want to show off our favorite 30 programmers who have inspired and influenced so many people to become better programmers. Let us know who has inspired you to start and become a better programmer!
* * * 30 People Who Know Lots About Programming * * *
#1Tim Berners-Lee | ||
 | Tim Berners-Lee’s Websites Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee - About Tim Berners-Lee Tim is the Inventor of HTML (hyper text markup language) and the World Wide Web. - In 2007, he was ranked Joint First, alongside Albert Hofmann, in The Telegraph’s list of 100 greatest living geniuses. | |
#2Matt Mullenweg | ||
 | Matt Mullenweg’s Websites Matt – http://ma.tt Wordpress – http://www.wordpress.com Wordpress Blog – http://matt.wordpress.com Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Mullenweg - About Matt Mullenweg Matt is the founder and creator of the open source WordPress blogging platform. - In 2005, he founded the company Automattic, the company behind WordPress and Akismet. | |
#3Larry Page | ||
 | Larry Page’s Websites Google – http://www.google.com Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page - About Larry Page Larry Page is best known for the co-founder of Google, alongside Sergy Brin. - He is the 6th richest person in America, and the 27th richest billionaire worldwide according to Forbes. | |
#4Sergey Brin | ||
 | Sergey Brin’s Websites Google – http://www.google.com Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin - About Sergey Brin Sergey was the co-founder of Google alongside Larry Page. - Sergey is ranked the 28th most richest person in the world according to the Forbes top 50 richest billionaires list 2009. | |
#5Linus Torvalds | ||
 | Linus Torvalds Websites Linux Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds - About Linus Torvalds Linux is the creator of the extremely popular Linux open source operating system. - Today, there are thousands of variations / distributions of Linux and many web servers run on it. Linus sure did create something ecstatic! | |
#6Dennis Ritchie | ||
 | Dennis Ritchie’s Websites 1 – http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/ C Programming Language Book – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language_(book) Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie - About Dennis Ritchie Dennis is best known for the creator of C and a huge key developer of the UNIX operating system. - He was born in 1941, and received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998 | |
#7Brian Kernighan | ||
 | Brian Kernighan’s Websites Bell Labs – http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/bwk/ C Programming Language Book – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language_(book) Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan - About Brian Kernighan Kernigham developed the UNIX operating system along side Ritchie and Thompson. - Brian is the author of many UNIX programmes, and is known as the coiner of the expression WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). | |
#8Ken Thompson | ||
 | Ken Thompson’s Websites Bell Labs – http://plan9.bell-labs.com/who/ken/ Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson_(programmer) - About Ken Thompson Ken is an American pioneer of computer science, and helped create the B programming language (which is now replaced by the C programming language). - He created UNIX alongside Kerighan and Ritchie, and helped create the Plan 9 operating systems distributed by Bell Labs. | |
#9Rasmus Lerdorf | ||
 | Rasmus Lerdorf’s Websites Bio – http://lerdorf.com/bio.php Toys – http://toys.lerdorf.com PHP – http://www.php.net Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf - About Rasmus Lerdorf Rasmus Lerdorf is the creator of PHP. He authorised the first 2 versions of PHP, and then contributed in the development of later versions of PHP. - PHP runs over 34% of websites online today, so Rasmus created something purely amazing. | |
#10Jason Fried | ||
 | Jason Fried’s Websites 37 Signals – http://www.37signals.com Twitter – http://twitter.com/jasonfried - About Jason Fried Jason Fried is the founder of 37 signals. 37 Signals have some amazing web apps out that thousands of people use daily. The 37 signals blog is very popular, and their job board gets hundreds of jobs posted. - Did I forget to mention they also invented ruby on rails? | |
#11James Gosling | ||
 | James Gosling’s Websites James Gosling – http://www.jamesgosling.com Apple Science Profile – http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/gosling/ Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling - About James Gosling James A. Gosling, is a famous software developer, best known as the father of the Java programming language. - He also has a personal website and a page over at the Apple Science website. | |
#12Brendan Eich | ||
 | Brendan Eich’s Websites Twitter – http://twitter.com/brendaneich Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich - About Brendan Eich Brendan Eich is a computer programmer and creator of the JavaScript programming language. - He is the Chief Technology Officer at the Mozilla Corporation. | |
#13Carl Sassenrath | ||
 | Carl Sassenrath’s Websites Official Site – http://www.sassenrath.com Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath - About Carl Sassenrath Carl Sassenrath is an architect of operating systems and computer languages. - He brought multitasking to personal computers in 1985 with the creation of the Amiga Computer operating system kernel, and he is currently the designer of the REBOL computer language as well as the CTO of REBOL Technologies. | |
#14Bjarne Stroustrup | ||
 | Bjarne Stroustrup’s Websites ATT Research – http://www.research.att.com/~bs/ Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjarne_Stroustrup - About Bjarne Stroustrup Bjarne Stroustrup is a computer scientist most notable for developing the C++ programming language. - He is currently Professor and holder of the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science at the Texas A&M University. | |
#15Bram Cohen | ||
 | Bram Cohen’s Websites Bram Cohen – http://bramcohen.com Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen - About Bram Cohen Bram Cohen is an American computer programmer, best known as the author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol. - He also created the first file sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent. | |
#16Alan Cooper | ||
 | Alan Cooper’s Websites Cooper – http://www.cooper.com/alan/father_of_vb.html Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cooper - About Alan Cooper Cooper is sometimes called “the father of Visual Basic”, although much of work on Visual Basic was done by Microsoft’s internal development group. - Cooper was the leading force behind VB 1.0 and pioneered the use of an IDE to create a GUI via wrapped calls to system routines in the API. | |
#17Larry Wall | ||
 | Larry Wall’s Websites Perl – http://www.perl.org Wall – http://www.wall.org/~larry/ Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall - About Larry Wall Larry Wall s a programmer and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987. - He is the co-author of Programming Perl, which is the definitive resource for Perl programmers. | |
#18Edsger Wybe Dijkstra | ||
 | Edsger Wybe Dijkstra’s Websites Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_Dijkstra Dijkstra’s Algorithm – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm - About Edsger Wybe Dijkstra Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist. - He received the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 2000. | |
#19John Resig | ||
 | John Resig’s Websites eJohn – http://ejohn.org jQuery – http://www.jquery.com Twitter – http://twitter.com/jeresig - About John Resig John is the creator of the very popular javascript library jQuery. He also is a javascript programmer, blogger and author. Oh and did i forget to mention he works for Mozilla? - He is currently working on his second book “Secrets of the javascript ninja”. | |
#20Guido van Rossum | ||
 | Guido van Rossum’s Websites Python – http://python.org/~guido/ Twitter – http://twitter.com/gvanrossum - About Guido van Rossum Guido is the author the the python programming language. He joined google back in 2005, and he loves the fact he gets to spend half the time there on python. - In June 2003, he was the finalist in the category IT Software (Individual) of the World Technology Network Awards. | |
#21Douglas Crockford | ||
 | Douglas Crockford’s Websites Crockford – http://www.crockford.com Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford - About Douglas Crockford Douglas Crockford is a senior JavaScript Architect at the most popular websites in the world, Yahoo! He is well known for his work in introducing JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). - He has also worked for companies such as Atari, Luciasfilm and Paramount. | |
#22Miguel de Icaza | ||
 | Miguel de Icaza’s Websites Blog – http://tirania.org/blog/ Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza - About Miguel de Icaza Miguel is a Mexican free software programmer, best known for starting the GNOME and Mono projects. - He came from a family of scientists in which his father was a physicist and his mother a biologist. Miguel started to write free software in 1992. | |
#23Jeff Atwood | ||
 | Jeff Atwood’s Websites Coding Horror – http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/ Twitter – http://twitter.com/codinghorror - About Jeff Atwood Jeff blogs about coding on CodingHorror. The blog is extremely popular, and has to date over 130,000 RSS Subscribers. - The blog features a very simplistic design, but obviously the content is extremely effective. | |
#24Kathy Sierra | ||
 | Kathy Sierra’s Websites Twitter – http://twitter.com/kathysierra Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra - About Kathy Sierra Kathy is a programming instructor and game developer. - She co-created the Head first series of books to do with computing. | |
#25Scott Hanselman | ||
 | Scott Hanselman’s Websites Hanselman – http://www.hanselman.com Twitter – http://twitter.com/shanselman - About Scott Hanselman Scott is the principal program manager at Microsoft’s developer division. He often speaks about software development at many Microsoft events. - He also publishes a blog and a very popular podcast around the technology lines. | |
#26Steven Frank | ||
 | Steven Frank’s Websites Panic – http://www.panic.com Steven Frank – http://stevenf.tumblr.com Twitter – http://twitter.com/stevenf - About Steven Frank Steven Frank is the co-founder of the extremely popular mac software company, “Panic”. - Panic make many amazing Mac applications. I would recommend buying more a less every one. | |
#27Ben Goodger | ||
 | Websites Ben Goodger Blog – http://www.bengoodger.com Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goodger - About Ben Goodger is a former employee of Netscape Communications Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation and former lead developer of the Firefox web browser. - He is currently working for Google Inc., where he leads the Google Chrome project. | |
#28Dion Almaer | ||
 | Dion Almaer’s Websites Ajaxian – http://ajaxian.com Almaer – http://almaer.com/blog/ Vimeo Profile – http://www.vimeo.com/dion Twitter – http://twitter.com/dalmaer - About Dion Almaer Dion is the co-founder of AjaxIan.com. AjaxIan teaches people about the popular javascript language, Ajax. - There are also many other writers at AjaxIan.com. There are hundreds of articles, and its the ultimate Ajax resource for developers. | |
#29Craig Newmark | ||
 | Craig Newmark’s Websites Craigslist – http://www.craigslist.org Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Newmark - About Craig Newmark Craig was born in 1952, and is the founder of the popular website Craigslist.com. - Craig developed Craigslist from the ground up, and today is used worldwide by thousands of people. He is an inspiration to all. | |
#30John D. Carmack | ||
 | John D. Carmack’s Websites Armadillo Aerospace – http://www.armadilloaerospace.com Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack - About John D. Carmack John D. Carmack is an American game programmer, and the co-founder of id Software. - Carmack was the lead programmer of the id computer games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and the sequels to Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein. | |
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afridy (3 years ago)
folks,
me and my friend also woking on a similar list for last 6 months. hmm, when i read some of the hot feedbacks here, i was in two minded weather to show my site or not LOL
coz it’s too does not have many ppl mentioned here. any way check it out folks.
http://czaars.com/
btw, i found this page after a google seach for a tech person.
once again, dont fire at me for including many ppl mentioned in your feedback there. coz me also maintaining that list as a part time work only. so still i am keep adding records when i get time.
Alf Christophersen (3 years ago)
Miss this person, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ole-Johan_Dahl, Ole Johan Dahl who, together with Kristen Nygaard invented Simula 67 and at the same time, object-oriented programming.
Faham (3 years ago)
Very interesting people, hope human network become as vast and kind…
Reza (3 years ago)
Matt Mullenweg does not deserver that position in my opinion, there ar emany reasons that there are much more people more influensive that him to be put over there
kovshenin (3 years ago)
Great list, thank you. A little typo here: “Larry Page is best known for the co-founder of Google, alongside Sergy Brin.” It’s Sergey
Cheers,
~ @kovshenin
gordon (3 years ago)
Interesting, almost all american names. And I heard that the best programmers are from east europe…
Steve (3 years ago)
…but the most important one, right at the top, is British
reboltutorial (3 years ago)
Carl Sassenrath is still making the Revolution see
http://reboltutorial.com/blog/why-carl-sassenrath-one-of-30-most-influential-people-in-programming/
felisberto (3 years ago)
where is bill gates?he should be on the list
tenouk (3 years ago)
if Linus Torvalds in the list … you must forgot to include Richard Matthew Stallman … and please… when you talk about Linux you must remember the GNU… and why people call Linux operating system GNU/Linux
wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
web: http://stallman.org/
Rob (3 years ago)
Where’s Jamie Zawinski?
caeser (3 years ago)
such a post will surely keep me coming to this website.
thanks mic
Fuzzy Lai (3 years ago)
Why is Donald Knuth absent?
Ignas (3 years ago)
You missed some persons who must be here and entered some people who do not deserve to be here I think. Because if you think that wordpress is equal to Linux, C, Google, HTML and WWW, I must say – no it’s not! WordPress, 37 signals and other small mentioned here must survive such a long time as other genius projects survived. Only after that you can put them equal to other genius.
Alan (3 years ago)
Yes, Where is Richard Stallman? How could you forget him? Can you imagine our world without GNU tools and GCC?
Andrés Mejía (3 years ago)
HTML is not programming.
Richie (3 years ago)
How can u forget Vint Cerf, the true father of the internet.. he must, infact lead the list… in my opinion…
angelo (3 years ago)
“popular javascript language, Ajax” huh? Ajax is a language?
Gabe (3 years ago)
This list is an okay list of influential web technologists, but as a list of contributors to programming it is an out and out travesty. Some of these people aren’t even programmers, and many of them have made no meaningful contribution to programming at all.
Joe (3 years ago)
I’m just really curious as to why Jeff Atwood is on there.
I respect him for Coding Horror, and even moreso for StackOverflow. I just don’t see him as someone they’ll talk about in 20 years.
I also agree with the others asking about Donald Knuth. That’s a fail.
But really, I would put Alan Turing on here. As the Father of Computer Science, I’m pretty sure there’s a lot that we do that is solely because of him.
steve (3 years ago)
then why the hell my name is not there huh ?
Christopher T. Lemay (3 years ago)
How could they leave out Grace Hopper?
Doug (3 years ago)
It’s surprising how many of them contributed to science with no intention to make money. What’s even more amazing is how they all embrace Open Source.
Don Knuth must have been number 1 on the list. Without him, this list is still incomplete
Srinivas (3 years ago)
Great List Thank you
Subin (3 years ago)
Indeed a list of great people.. Thank you
E (3 years ago)
Did you forget John Backus?
And Dijkstra certainly deserves to be in the top 10, him not being there pretty much voids this list.
Mesay Solomon (3 years ago)
What happened to Donald Knuth , Richard Stallman, Alan Kay…
M.M.F (3 years ago)
Great list
pcsin (2 years ago)
I think u missed Andrew S. Tanenbaum too
Richard - web accessibility testing (2 years ago)
If lines of code in use today is a marker then probably Grace Hopper should be at the top of the list for inventing Cobol.
The most obvious missing person here though is Alan Turing, who has to be one of the fathers of programming.
David Payne Melbourne Victoria (1 year ago)
If lines of code in use today is a marker then probably Grace Hopper should be at the top of the list for inventing Cobol.
If you used the number of programs or total bytes of object code, COBOL might still be ahead, but it would be a fairer comparison. Forth & APL shouldn’t lose out because their source code can be MUCH smaller.
Grace invented the idea of a COBOL, got manufacturers to create & support it and chaired the committee. Not sure she invented the specific language but I feel those things were more important. Earlier she may have written the first compiler.
Haberi (2 years ago)
thank you for the good list.
some guy (2 years ago)
There’s a typo in the “about” of Linus Torvalds. Linux didn’t create itself, the sentence should start with “Linus” not “Linux”.
itzikbs (2 years ago)
The list is Ridiculously and tendentious
eglenceli (2 years ago)
thanks for very good post.
A.Arce (2 years ago)
I personally have the utmost respect for Scott Hanselman, I follow his blog and listen to his podcast regularly, and I can see how he’s made it on this list of influential programmers; however, it’s hard for me think that he would be named over Anders Hejlsberg.
Anders Hejlsberg is the creator of C#, he also was the original author of Turbo Pascal and chief architect of Delphi, if it wasn’t for Anders, the .NET Framework would not be what it is today.
Asad (2 years ago)
where are the indians or pakistanis on this group? I’m sure there are some up there in the programming industry. ??
dev (2 years ago)
Oh come on people :
Knuth and Grace Hopper are absent on the list
what are you thinking fellas?
m.gh (1 year ago)
How can u forget “Mother of Cobol” Grace Hopper?
—
how can u forget “Art of Computer Programming” Donald Knuth?
—
How can u forget “Turbo Pascal, Delphi ,C# and .Net ” Anders Hejlsberg”?
hossein rabiee (1 year ago)
I wish someday we’d like these people.
delgermurun (1 year ago)
Where is Bill Gates?
David Payne (1 year ago)
As well as folk in other comments, Countess Ada Lovelace has been called the 1st programmer (a stretch), Konrad Zuse’s Plankalkül wasn’t influential but should have been. Algol 1960 is perhaps the most seminal high level language, Lisp, Forth among other pioneer efforts of major but less influence. (APL & Mandala original but not so seminal?)
Bill Joy’s PROGRAMMING prob. more important than LinusT’s who’s greatest feat is defying Brook’s law (Team Management).
Another list could be made for prophet/advocates like Vanevar Bush, William Grey Walter, Trevor Pearcey, RAS, Ted Nelson, Alan Kay & Doug Engelbart; far more important to study than Watson Jr, Gates & Jobs.
David Payne (1 year ago)
BTW I suspect jamesgosling.com is a different person of the same name. A Novell oriented network engineer, not the inventor of NEWS, Java etc.
David Wetherell (1 year ago)
List is good up to like 20 something and then you get a lil wacky .. I like the concept tho.
hexc0der (1 year ago)
i’ll be in this list ^^
BG (9 months ago)
The best programmers in the world are “Hackers” and Virus programmers and Anti-virus programmers. I think you should appreciate them how they have created or solved the most security issues in the world. they may not famous but they are most influential people in the world.
ray makuyana (9 months ago)
You left out marc andressen, who created the first web browser ‘Netscape’
Burhan Raizada (4 months ago)
Oh really!?, what about Steve Wozniak?
memi (4 months ago)
where the hell is Bill Gates?
August Karlstrom (1 month ago)
Niklaus Wirth is my main inspiration when it comes to being a better programmer.
martin (2 weeks ago)
Ted Codd, inventor of the Relational Database/SQL, deserves a mention. If programming is about Data Processing, a technology that overturned the way Data is Processed is absolutely massive! Without him there could have been no Oracle -and he developed his ideas from within IBM, right against the grain of IBM’s own products and strategies!