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.
Contents
• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• J
• K
• L
• M
• N
• O
• P
• R
• S
• T
• V
• W
• Y
• Z
• See also
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A
• Scott Adams – series of text adventures beginning in the late 1970s
• 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
• Sam Altman – OpenAI
• Lennart Augustsson – languages (Lazy ML, Cayenne), compilers (HBC Haskell, parallel Haskell front end, Bluespec SystemVerilog early), LPMud pioneer, NetBSD device drivers
B
• Lars Bak – virtual machine specialist
• Friedrich L. Bauer – Stack (data structure), Sequential Formula Translation, ALGOL, software engineering, Bauer–Fike theorem
• Tim Berners-Lee – invented World Wide Web
• Eric Bina – cocreated Mosaic web browser
• Marc Blank – cocreated Zork
• Joshua Bloch – core Java language designer, lead the Java collections framework project
• Susan G. Bond – cocreated ALGOL 68-R
• Grady Booch – cocreated Unified Modeling Language
• Ed Boon – Mortal Kombat
• David Bradley – coder on the IBM PC project team who wrote the Control-Alt-Delete keyboard handler, embedded in all PC-compatible BIOSes
• Larry Breed – implementation of Iverson Notation (APL), co-developed APL\360, Scientific Time Sharing Corporation cofounder
• Jack Elton Bresenham – created Bresenham's line algorithm
• 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
• 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
• Dries Buytaert – created Drupal
C
• Edwin Catmull – co-founder of Pixar, Catmull–Rom spline, Catmull–Clark subdivision surface, texture mapping
• 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
• Brad Cox – Objective-C
• William Crowther – Colossal Cave Adventure
• Ward Cunningham – created Wiki concept
D
• Terry A. Davis – developer of TempleOS
• L. Peter Deutsch – Ghostscript, Assembler for PDP-1, XDS-940 timesharing system, QED original co-author
• 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
E
• 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
• 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
• Scott Fahlman – created smiley face emoticon :-)
• Dan Farmer – created COPS and Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN) Security Scanners
• Stuart Feldman – created make, authored Fortran 77 compiler, part of original group that created Unix
• David Filo – cocreated Yahoo!
• Hal Finney — helped Satoshi Nakamoto debug Bitcoin, reusable proof-of-work, and early developer of Pretty Good Privacy.
• Martin Fowler – created the dependency injection pattern of software engineering, a form of inversion of control
G
• Elon Gasper – cofounded Bright Star Technology, patented realistic facial movements for in-game speech; HyperAnimator, Alphabet Blocks, etc.
• Steve Gibson – created SpinRite
• John Gilmore – GNU Debugger (GDB)
• Adele Goldberg – cocreated Smalltalk
• Bill Gosper – Macsyma, Lisp machine, hashlife, helped Donald Knuth on Vol.2 of The Art of Computer Programming (Semi-numerical algorithms)
• David Gries – The book The Science of Programming, Interference freedom, Member Emeritus, IFIP Working Group 2.3 on Programming Methodology
• 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
• Nico Habermann – work on operating systems, software engineering, inter-process communication, process synchronization, deadlock avoidance, software verification, programming languages: ALGOL 60, BLISS, Pascal, Ada
• 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)
• David Heinemeier Hansson – created the Ruby on Rails framework for developing web applications
• Gernot Heiser – operating system teaching, research, commercialising, Open Kernel Labs, OKL4, Wombat
• Ted Henter – founded Henter-Joyce (now part of Freedom Scientific) created JAWS screen reader software for blind people
• D. Richard Hipp – created SQLite
• C. A. R. Hoare – first implementation of quicksort, ALGOL 60 compiler, Communicating sequential processes
• John Henry Holland – pioneer in what became known as genetic algorithms, developed Holland's schema theorem, Learning Classifier Systems
• Allen Holub – author and public speaker, Agile Manifesto signatory
• David A. Huffman – created the Huffman coding; a compression algorithm
• P. J. Hyett – cofounded GitHub
I
• Roberto Ierusalimschy – Lua leading architect
• Geir Ivarsøy – cocreated Opera web browser
• Toru Iwatani – created Pac-Man
J
• Bo Jangeborg – ZX Spectrum games
• Paul Jardetzky – authored server program for the first webcam
• Lynne Jolitz – 386BSD
• William Jolitz – 386BSD
• Robert K. Jung – created ARJ
K
• Poul-Henning Kamp – MD5 password hash algorithm, FreeBSD GEOM and GBDE, part of UFS2, FreeBSD Jails, malloc and the Beerware license
• 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
• 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)
• 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
L
• 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
• Sam Lantinga – created Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL)
• Dick Lathwell – codeveloped APL\360
• Tim Berners-Lee – inventor of the World Wide Web
• Rasmus Lerdorf – original creator of PHP
• Michael Lesk – Lex
• Max Levchin – co-founder of PayPal
• Håkon Wium Lie – co-authored Cascading Style Sheets
• 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
• Robert Love – Linux kernel developer
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• Jude Milhon – founding member of the Cypherpunks
• Arvind Mithal – formal verification of large digital systems, developing dynamic dataflow architectures, parallel computing programming languages (Id, pH), compiling on parallel machines
• 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
• Charles H. Moore – created Forth language
• Matt Mullenweg – co-authored WordPress
• Boyd Munro – Australian developed GRASP, owns SDI, one of earliest software development companies
• Mike Muuss – authored ping, network tool to detect hosts
N
• Fredrik Neij – cocreated The Pirate Bay
• 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
O
P
• Larry Page – cofounded Google, Inc.
• Tony Parisi – Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML)
• David Park (1935–1990) – first Lisp implementation, expert in fairness, program schemas, bisimulation in concurrent computing
• Tim Paterson – authored 86-DOS (QDOS)
• Markus Persson – created Minecraft
• Charles Petzold – authored many Microsoft Windows programming books
• Kent Pitman – technical contributor to the ANSI Common Lisp standard
• Tom Preston-Werner – cofounded GitHub
R
• 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
• 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
• Ron Rivest – cocreated RSA algorithm (being the R in that name). created RC4 and MD5
• Blake Ross – co-authored Mozilla Firefox
• Douglas T. Ross – Automatically Programmed Tools (APT), Computer-aided design, structured analysis and design technique, ALGOL X
• Philip Rubin – articulatory synthesis (ASY), sinewave synthesis (SWS), and HADES signal processing system.
• Jeff Rulifson – lead programmer on the NLS project
• Mark Russinovich – Sysinternals.com, Filemon, Regmon, Process Explorer, TCPView and RootkitRevealer
S
• Muni Sakya – Nepalese software
• 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
• Ken Silverman – created Duke Nukem 3D's graphics engine
• 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
• 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
• Alexander Stepanov – created Standard Template Library
• Christopher Strachey – draughts playing program
• Bjarne Stroustrup – created C++
• Zeev Suraski – cocreated PHP language
• Herb Sutter – chair of ISO C++ standards committee and C++ expert
• Gottfrid Svartholm – cocreated The Pirate Bay
• Aaron Swartz – software developer, writer, Internet activist
T
• Amir Taaki – leading developer of Bitcoin project
• Audrey "Autrijus" Tang – designed Pugs compiler–interpreter for Perl 6 (now Raku); Digital Affairs Minister, Taiwan 2022–2024
• 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
• Linus Torvalds – original author and current maintainer of Linux kernel and created Git, a source code management system
• Alan Turing – mathematician, computer scientist and cryptanalyst
V
• 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
• Patrick Volkerding – original author and current maintainer of Slackware Linux Distribution
W
• Eiiti Wada – ALGOL N, IFIP WG 2.1 member, Japanese Industrial Standards (JIS) X 0208, 0212, Happy Hacking Keyboard
• John Walker – cofounded Autodesk
• Chris Wanstrath – cofounded GitHub, created the Atom (text editor) and the Mustache template system
• John Warnock – created PostScript
• 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
• why the lucky stiff – created libraries and writing for Ruby, including quirky, popular Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby to teach programming
• Bruce Wilcox – created Computer Go, programmed NEMESIS Go Master
• Evan Williams – created and cofounded language Logo
• Dave Winer – developed XML-RPC, Frontier scripting language
• Will Wright – created the Sim City series, cofounded Maxis
Y
Z
See also