Gary Kildall
Creator of the CP/M operating system and founder of Digital Research, a personal-computer software pioneer whose CP/M lost the IBM PC to Microsoft's DOS.
People
The inventors and builders behind the languages and the tools.
152 entries, all primary-sourced
George Boole
Nineteenth-century English mathematician who created Boolean algebra in 'The Laws of Thought' (1854), the algebra of true and false that later became the basis of digital logic.
Gerald Jay Sussman
MIT professor who co-created the Scheme programming language and co-wrote the textbook 'Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs'.
Gordon Moore
Co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, and author of the 1965 article that gave Moore's Law its name.
Grady Booch
American software engineer who co-created the Unified Modeling Language and the Booch method, and a long-standing voice on software architecture and the history of computing.
Graydon Hoare
The programmer who started Rust as a personal project around 2006, which Mozilla later sponsored and grew into a widely used systems language.
Guido van Rossum
Dutch programmer who created Python and led it for decades as its self-described Benevolent Dictator For Life until stepping down in 2018.
Hakon Wium Lie
The engineer who proposed Cascading Style Sheets in 1994 while working with Tim Berners-Lee, and who later became chief technology officer of Opera.
Haskell Curry
American logician who developed combinatory logic and whose name lives on in the Haskell language, the technique of currying, and the proofs-as-programs correspondence.
James Duncan Davidson
Creator of Apache Ant and Apache Tomcat, both of which began during his work at Sun Microsystems.
James Gosling
Canadian computer scientist who led the design and implementation of the Java programming language at Sun Microsystems, earning the nickname 'the father of Java.'
Jay Kreps
Co-creator of Apache Kafka at LinkedIn and co-founder of Confluent, who articulated the log-centric view of data systems in his essay 'The Log'.
Jeff Dean
Google engineer and Chief Scientist whose work spans MapReduce, Bigtable, and Spanner, and later the Brain project and TensorFlow.
Jeff Sutherland
Co-creator of Scrum with Ken Schwaber, co-author of the Scrum Guide, and a signatory of the Agile Manifesto.
Jim Blandy
Free-software developer who named Subversion and did its original repository design, with a long career spanning GNU Emacs, GDB, and later Mozilla and Rust.
Joe Armstrong
Principal creator of Erlang at Ericsson and champion of the let-it-crash approach to building fault-tolerant, massively concurrent systems.
John Backus
American computer scientist who led the IBM team that created FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language.
John Hennessy
Stanford computer architect who led the MIPS project, co-authored the field-defining textbooks with David Patterson, became Stanford's president and Alphabet's chairman, and shared the 2017 ACM Turing Award.
John Hughes
Functional programming researcher at Chalmers who wrote the influential 'Why Functional Programming Matters' and co-created the property-based testing tool QuickCheck.
John McCarthy
Inventor of LISP, the scientist who coined the term 'artificial intelligence,' and a pioneer of automatic memory management.
John Ousterhout
Stanford computer science professor who created the Tcl scripting language and Tk toolkit, co-created the Raft consensus algorithm, and led the RAMCloud and log-structured filesystem research.
Ken Thompson
Bell Labs researcher who created the first Unix and the B language, and later co-designed UTF-8 and the Go language.
Kent Beck
American software engineer who created Extreme Programming and Test-Driven Development, co-wrote the JUnit testing framework, and was a signer of the Agile Manifesto.
Kurt Godel
Austrian logician whose 1931 incompleteness theorems showed that any sufficiently powerful formal system contains true statements it cannot prove, a result that shaped computability theory.
Larry Ellison
Co-founder and longtime chief executive of Oracle, who built one of the world's largest enterprise software companies on the commercial relational database.
Larry McVoy
Founder of BitMover and creator of BitKeeper, the proprietary distributed version control system the Linux kernel used from 2002 to 2005.
Leonard Adleman
Computer scientist, the 'A' in RSA and a founder of DNA computing, co-recipient of the 2002 Turing Award.
Leonid Levin
Mathematician and computer scientist who independently discovered NP-completeness in the USSR around 1971-73, giving his name to the Cook-Levin theorem, and later joined the faculty at Boston University.
Leslie Lamport
American computer scientist whose work on logical clocks, consensus, and fault tolerance laid much of the foundation for modern distributed systems; winner of the 2013 ACM Turing Award.
Linus Torvalds
Finnish programmer who began the Linux kernel in 1991 and later created git, and who still coordinates Linux kernel development.
Lynn Conway
Computer scientist who co-led the VLSI design revolution, invented the multi-project chip, and earlier pioneered dynamic instruction scheduling at IBM; later a noted advocate.
Marc Andreessen
American programmer who co-created NCSA Mosaic as a student, co-founded Netscape, and later became a leading Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
Marc Rochkind
Bell Labs programmer who created SCCS, the Source Code Control System, generally regarded as the first version-control system, in the early 1970s.
Margaret Hamilton
Computer scientist who led the Apollo on-board flight software effort at MIT and helped popularize the term software engineering.
Martin Fowler
British software developer and author whose books on refactoring, design patterns, and enterprise architecture made systematic code improvement mainstream practice.
Martin Hellman
Stanford engineer who co-invented public-key cryptography and key exchange with Whitfield Diffie, shared the 2015 Turing Award, and later worked on reducing nuclear risk.
Martin Odersky
EPFL professor who created the Scala language and, earlier, did the work on Pizza and GJ that led to the modern javac compiler and Java generics.
Matei Zaharia
Computer scientist who created Apache Spark and the RDD abstraction at UC Berkeley, co-founded Databricks, and led work on MLflow and Delta Lake.
Matt Mackall
The programmer who created Mercurial in April 2005, in the same month as git, after BitKeeper withdrew its free version for Linux kernel development.
Mendel Rosenblum
Stanford professor whose Disco research led to VMware, which he co-founded; a pioneer of modern x86 virtualization.
Michael "Monty" Widenius
Main creator of MySQL and later founder of its community fork MariaDB, both named after his daughters.
Michael Stonebraker
UC Berkeley professor who built Ingres and Postgres and won the 2014 Turing Award for modern database systems.
Mitchell Hashimoto
Co-founder of HashiCorp and creator of Vagrant, Terraform, Packer, Consul, and Vault - one of the most influential figures in modern DevOps and cloud infrastructure tooling.
Niklaus Wirth
Swiss computer scientist who designed Pascal and later languages such as Modula-2 and Oberon, and won the 1984 Turing Award for his work on programming languages.
Noam Chomsky
Linguist whose formal grammars and 1956 classification of languages, now called the Chomsky hierarchy, became the theoretical backbone of how programming-language syntax is defined and parsed.
Phil Zimmermann
Creator of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy, 1991), the software that put strong public-key encryption in the hands of ordinary people - and the target of a US criminal investigation that became a landmark of the crypto wars.
Philip Wadler
Functional programming researcher who brought monads into Haskell, co-designed type classes, and connected logic and programming through the Curry-Howard correspondence.
Rasmus Lerdorf
The Greenlandic-Danish-Canadian programmer who created PHP, originally a small set of CGI tools for tracking visits to his personal home page.