Notable programmer - Definition and Overview

This is a list of programmers notable for their contributions to software, either as original author or architect, or for later additions.

See also: Game programmer, List of computer scientists Free Software authors

A - B - C - D-F - G-H - I-J - K-L - M - N-R - S - T-V - W-Z

A

• Clifford Adams - author of the UseModWiki wiki software
• Leonard Adleman - co-inventor of the RSA algorithm (the A in the name stands for Adleman), coined the term computer virus
• Alfred Aho - co-creator of AWK programming language (the A in the name stands for Aho)
• Paul Allen - Altair BASIC, Apple II BASIC, co-founded Microsoft
• Eric Allman - sendmail, syslog
• Marc Andreessen - co-creator of Mosaic, co-founder of Netscape
• Bill Atkinson - QuickDraw, HyperCard

B

• Richard Bartle - MUD, with Roy Tubshaw, the father of MUDs
• Donald Becker - Linux Ethernet drivers, Beowulf clustering
• Sir Tim Berners-Lee - inventor of the World Wide Web
• Brian Behlendorf - Apache
• Daniel J. Bernstein - djbdns, qmail
• Eric Bina - co-creator of Mosaic web browser
• Deane Blazie founder of Blazie Engineering (now part of Freedom Scientific), created technology for blind people who use braille
• Bert Bos - author of Argo web browser, co-author of Cascading Style Sheets
• David Bradley - coder on the IBM PC project team who wrote the Control-Alt-Delete keyboard handler, embedded in all PC-compatible BIOSes
• Dan Bricklin - co-creator of VisiCalc, the first personal spreadsheet program
• Sergey Brin - co-creator of Google
• Richard Brodie - Microsoft Word
• Danielle Bunten Berry (Dani Bunten) - M.U.L.E., multiplayer video game
• Jim Button - author PC-File flatfile database; he is considered one of the fathers of shareware

C

• Steve Capps - co-creator of Macintosh and Newton
• John Carmack - first person shooters Doom, Quake
• Vinton Cerf - TCP/IP, NCP
• Steve Chamberlain - BFD, Cygwin
• Mike Cowlishaw - REXX and NetRexx, LEXX editor, image processing, decimal arithmetic packages
• Alan Cooper - Visual Basic
• Alan Cox - a developer of the Linux kernel
• Brad Cox - Objective-C
• Mark Crispin – inventor of IMAP, author of UW-IMAP, one of the reference implementations of IMAP4
• William Crowther - Colossal Cave Adventure
• Ward Cunningham - inventor of the WikiWiki concept
• Dave Cutler - architect of Windows NT, VMS

D-F

• James Duncan Davidson - creator of Tomcat, now part of the Jakarta Project
• L. Peter Deutsch - Ghostscript, Assembler for PDP-1, XDS-940 timesharing system, qed text editor original co-author
• Edsger Dijkstra - contributions to ALGOL, Dijkstra's algorithm, Go To Statement Considered Harmful
• Les Earnest - author of the finger program
• Larry Ellison - co-creator of Oracle database, co-founder of Oracle Corporation
• Marc Ewing - creator of Red Hat Linux
• Stuart Feldman - creator of make, author of Fortran 77 compiler, part of original group that created UNIX
• Jay Fenlason - original hack, GAS
• David Filo - co-creator of Yahoo!
• Andrew Fluegelman - author PC-Talk communications software; he is considered one of the fathers of shareware
• Brian Fox - creator of Bash, Readline, GNU Finger, Meta-HTML
• Peter Fraser - FRED text editor
• Jim Fruchterman founder of Arkenstone (now part of Freedom Scientific) created scanners for blind people

G-H

• Bill Gates - Altair BASIC, Apple II BASIC, co-founded Microsoft
• John Gilmore - GDB
• Adele Goldberg - co-inventor of Smalltalk
• 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
• Richard Greenblatt - Lisp machine, Incompatible Timesharing System, MacHack
• Ralph Griswold - co-creator of SNOBOL and creator of Icon programming language.
• Andi Gutmans - co-creator of PHP programming language
• Cecil Hastings - wrote the classic Approximations for Digital Computers 1950s formulas for sin, cos, etc.
• Anders Hejlsberg -- Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#
• Ted Henter founder of Henter-Joyce (now part of Freedom Scientific) creator of Jaws, voice software for blind people
• Andy Hertzfeld - co-creator of Macintosh, co-founder of General Magic, co-founder of Eazel
• C. A. R. Hoare - first implementation of quicksort, Algol 60 compiler
• Grace Hopper - Navy Mark I computer, FLOW-MATIC (which heavily influenced COBOL)

I-J

• Miguel de Icaza - GNOME project leader, initiator of the Mono project
• Dan Ingalls - co-inventor of Smalltalk
• Toru Iwatani - creator of Pac-Man
• Bo Jangeborg - ZX Spectrum games
• Steven C. Johnson - yacc
• Lynne Jolitz - 386BSD
• William Jolitz - 386BSD
• Bill Joy - BSD, vi; founded Sun Microsystems

K-L

• Ted Kaehler - co-inventor of Smalltalk
• Mitch Kapor - Lotus 1-2-3, founded Lotus Development Corporation
• Phil Katz - creator of the ZIP file format, author of PKZIP
• Mel Kaye [1] (http://info.astrian.net/jargon/Hacker_Folklore/The_Story_of_Mel.html), a Real Programmer
• Stan Kelly-Bootle - Manchester Mark I, The Devil's DP Dictionary
• Brian Kernighan - co-creator of AWK programming language (the K in the name stands for Kernighan), author of ditroff text-formatting tool
• Gary Kildall - CP/M
• Tom Knight - Incompatible Timesharing System
• Donald E. Knuth - TeX, CWEB, Metafont, The Art of Computer Programming
• Leslie Lamport - LaTeX
• Butler Lampson - qed text editor original co-author
• Tom Lane - primary author of libjpeg, major developer of PostgreSQL
• Rasmus Lerdorf - original creator of PHP
• Michael Lesk - Lex
• Håkon Wium Lie - co-author of Cascading Style Sheets
• Robert Love - Linux kernel developer
• Ada Lovelace - First programmer (of Babbage Machines)

M

• Yukihiro Matsumoto - Ruby
• John McCarthy - Lisp
• Craig McClanahan - original author of Jakarta Struts, architect of Tomcat Catalina servlet container
• Douglas McIlroy - pipes and filters, concept of software componentry, Unix tools (spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, tr, etc.)
• Marshall Kirk McKusick - BSD
• Bertrand Meyer - Eiffel, Object-oriented Software Construction, Design by contract
• Bob Miner - co-creator of Oracle database, co-founder of Oracle Corporation
• Jeff Minter - Psychedelic, and often llama-related video games
• Lou Montulli - creator of Lynx browser, cookies, the blink tag, server push and client pull, HTTP proxying, HTTPS over SSL, browser integration with animated GIFs, founding member of HTML working group at W3C
• Bram Moolenaar - author of text-editor Vim
• David Moon - MacLisp, ZetaLisp
• Chuck Moore - Forth
• Urban Müller - Brainfuck language
• Mike Muuss - author of ping, network tool to detect hosts

N-R

• Col Needham - creator of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
• Peter Norton - programmer of the famous file manager program, Norton Commander
• Kristen Nygaard - SIMULA
• Ed Oates - co-creator of Oracle database, co-founder of Oracle Corporation
• Jarkko Oikarinen - creator of Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
• Andrew and Philip Oliver, The Oliver Twins - Many ZX Spectrum games including Dizzy
• Larry Page - co-creator of Google
• Tim Paterson - QDOS
• Alexey Pajitnov - inventor of the game Tetris on the Electronica 60
• Charles Petzold - author of many Microsoft Windows programming books
• Rob Pike - co-creator of UTF-8 character encoding, creator of editor sam, part of creation of Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems
• Jef Raskin - started the Macintosh project in Apple Computer, designed Canon Cat computer, developed The Humane Environment program
• Dennis Ritchie - C, Unix
• Ron Rivest - co-inventor of the RSA algorithm (the R in the name stands for Rivest)
• Mark Rochkind - SCCS, see SCM, SCM History
• Guido van Rossum - Python
• Eric Raymond - Open Source movement, author of fetchmail
• Steve Russell - First Lisp interpreter; original Spacewar graphic computer game.

S

• Bill Schelter - GNU Maxima, GNU Common Lisp
• Ken Silverman - creator of Duke Nukem 3D's graphics engine
• Adi Shamir - co-inventor of the RSA algorithm (the S in the name stands for Shamir)
• Cliff Shaw - IPL, the first AI language
• Charles Simonyi - Hungarian notation, Microsoft Word
• Henry Spencer - C News, Regex
• Richard Stallman - Emacs, GCC, GDB, founder and pioneer of the GNU Project, terminal-independent I/O pioneer on ITS, Lisp machine manual (chineual)
• Guy Steele - Common Lisp, Scheme
• Bjarne Stroustrup - C++
• Zeev Suraski - co-creator of PHP programming language
• Gerald Jay Sussman - Scheme
• Tim Sweeney - The Unreal engine, UnrealScript, ZZT

T-V

• Andrew Tanenbaum - Minix
• Larry Tesler - Gypsy
• Avie Tevanian - author of the Mach kernel
• Ken Thompson - Unix, B (precursor of C), Bon programming language, co-creator of UTF-8 character encoding, introduced regular expressions in qed text editor
• Michael Tiemann - GCC
• Linus Torvalds - original author and current maintainer of the Linux kernel
• Roy Tubshaw - MUD - together with Richard Bartle, the father of MUDs
• Andrew Tridgell - Samba, Rsync
• Wietse Venema - Postfix, SATAN, TCP Wrapper
• Paul Vixie - BIND, Cron

W-Z

• Larry Wall - warp, rn, patch, Perl
• Bob Wallace - author PC-Write word processor; he is considered one of the fathers of shareware
• John Warnock - creator of PostScript
• Pei-Yuan Wei - author of Viola, one of the earliest graphical browsers
• Peter Weinberger - co-creator of AWK programming language (the W in the name stands for Weinberger)
• David Wheeler - co-inventor of the subroutine; designer of WAKE; co-designer of Tiny Encryption Algorithm, XTEA, Burrows-Wheeler transform. (see http://www.dwheeler.com/dwheeler.html); this refers to several David Wheelers in computing
• Roberta and Ken Williams -- Sierra, King's Quest, graphic adventure game
• Dave Winer – developed XML-RPC, Frontier scripting language
• Niklaus Wirth - Pascal
• Don Woods - INTERCAL, Colossal Cave Adventure
• Steve Wozniak - Breakout, Apple Integer BASIC, founded Apple Computer (with Steve Jobs)
• Jerry Yang - co-creator of Yahoo!
• Egon Zakrajšek - pioneer of computer science in Slovenia, texbooks for Z-23 assembler, structran
• Jamie Zawinski - Lucid Emacs, Netscape, Mozilla, XScreenSaver