List of programmers
Appearance
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.
A
- Michael Abrash – program optimization and x86 assembly language
- Scott Adams – series of text adventures beginning in the late 1970s
- Tarn Adams – Dwarf Fortress
- 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)
- Andrei Alexandrescu – author, expert on languages C++, D
- Paul Allen – Altair BASIC, Applesoft BASIC, cofounded Microsoft
- Eric Allman – sendmail, syslog
- Mosaic, cofounded Netscape
- Jeremy Ashkenas – CoffeeScript programming language and Backbone.js
- Bill Atkinson – QuickDraw, HyperCard
- Lennart Augustsson – languages (Lazy ML, Cayenne), compilers (HBC Haskell, parallel Haskell front end, Bluespec SystemVerilog early), LPMud pioneer, NetBSD device drivers
B
- Roland Carl Backhouse – computer program construction, algorithmic problem solving, ALGOL
- John Backus – Fortran, BNF
- Lars Bak – virtual machine specialist
- Roy Trubshaw, created MUDs
- Stack (data structure), Sequential Formula Translation, ALGOL, software engineering, Bauer–Fike theorem
- Kent Beck – created Extreme programming, cocreated JUnit
- Donald Becker – Linux Ethernet drivers, Beowulf clustering
- Brian Behlendorf – Apache HTTP Server
- Doug Bell – Dungeon Master series of video games
- Fabrice Bellard – created FFmpeg open codec library, QEMU virtualization tools
- Tim Berners-Lee – invented World Wide Web
- Daniel J. Bernstein – djbdns, qmail
- Mosaic web browser
- Marc Blank – cocreated Zork
- Joshua Bloch – core Java language designer, lead the Java collections framework project
- Jonathan Blow – video games Braid and The Witness
- Susan G. Bond – cocreated ALGOL 68-R
- Grady Booch – cocreated Unified Modeling Language
- Cascading Style Sheets
- Stephen R. Bourne – cocreated ALGOL 68C, created Bourne shell
- IBM PC project team who wrote the Control-Alt-Delete keyboard handler, embedded in all PC-compatible BIOSes
- Andrew Braybrook – video games Paradroid and Uridium
- Larry Breed – implementation of Iverson Notation (APL), co-developed APL\360, Scientific Time Sharing Corporation cofounder
- Jack Elton Bresenham – created Bresenham's line algorithm
- Dan Bricklin – cocreated VisiCalc, the first personal spreadsheet program
- Walter Bright – Digital Mars, First C++ compiler, authored D (programming language)
- Sergey Brin – cofounded Google Inc.
- Richard Brodie – Microsoft Word
- Hack, former maintainer of man pager, Linux kernelhacker
- 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
- Macintosh and Newton
- Doom, Quake
- TCP/IP, NCP
- Ward Christensen – wrote the first BBS (Bulletin Board System) system CBBS
- Edgar F. Codd – principal architect of relational model
- BitTorrentprotocol design and implementation
- Alain Colmerauer – Prolog
- Richard W. Conway – compilers for CORC, CUPL, and PL/C; XCELL Factory Modelling System
- Alan Cooper – Visual Basic
- Mike Cowlishaw – REXX and NetRexx, LEXX editor, image processing, decimal arithmetic packages
- Alan Cox – co-developed Linux kernel
- Brad Cox – Objective-C
- IMAP4
- William Crowther – Colossal Cave Adventure
- Ward Cunningham – created Wiki concept
D
- Ole-Johan Dahl – cocreated Simula, object-oriented programming
- Ryan Dahl – created Node.js
- James Duncan Davidson – created Tomcat, now part of Jakarta Project
- Terry A. Davis – developer of TempleOS
- XDS-940 timesharing system, QEDoriginal co-author
- Robert Dewar – IFIP WG 2.1 member, chairperson, ALGOL 68; AdaCore cofounder, president, CEO
- Go To Statement Considered Harmful, IFIP WG 2.1member
- DragonflyBSD
- Jack Dorsey – created Twitter
- Martin Dougiamas – creator and lead developed Moodle
- uIP embedded TCP/IP stacks, invented protothreads
E
- fingerprogram
- Alan Edelman – Edelman's Law, stochastic operator, Interactive Supercomputing, Julia (programming language) cocreator, high performance computing, numerical computing
- Brendan Eich – created JavaScript
- Larry Ellison – co-created Oracle Database, cofounded Oracle Corporation
- Andrey Ershov – languages ALPHA, Rapira; first Soviet time-sharing system AIST-0, electronic publishing system RUBIN, multiprocessing workstation MRAMOR, IFIP WG 2.1member, 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
- Warlords and Puzzle Quest
- Fortran 77 compiler, part of original group that created Unix
- David Filo – cocreated Yahoo!
- Livejournal and OpenID
- Andrew Fluegelman – author PC-Talk communications software; considered a cocreated shareware
- Mahmoud Samir Fayed – created PWCT and Ring
- 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.
- Bill Gates – Altair BASIC, cofounded Microsoft
- Nick Gerakines – author, contributor to open-source Erlang projects
- Jim Gettys – X Window System, HTTP/1.1, One Laptop per Child, Bufferbloat
- Steve Gibson – created SpinRite
- John Gilmore – GNU Debugger (GDB)
- Adele Goldberg – cocreated Smalltalk
- Robert Griesemer – cocreated Go
- ioquake3
- 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)
- Yahoo! Store, On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp
- John Graham-Cumming – authored POPFile, a Bayesian filter-based e-mail classifier
- David Gries – The book The Science of Programming, Interference freedom, Member Emeritus, IFIP Working Group 2.3 on Programming Methodology
- Ralph Griswold – cocreated SNOBOL, created Icon (programming language)
- MacHack
- 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
- polyhedra theory, ALGOL 68C; work with John Horton Conway
H
- Daniel Ha – cofounder and CEO of blog comment platform Disqus
- Nico Habermann – work on operating systems, software engineering, inter-process communication, process synchronization, deadlock avoidance, software verification, programming languages: ALGOL 60, BLISS, Pascal, Ada
- Jim Hall – started the FreeDOS project
- 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)
- quote notation, ALGOL
- David Heinemeier Hansson – created the Ruby on Rails framework for developing web applications
- Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate and Dragon Wars
- Gernot Heiser – operating system teaching, research, commercialising, Open Kernel Labs, OKL4, Wombat
- Anders Hejlsberg – Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, TypeScript
- Ted Henter – founded Henter-Joyce (now part of Freedom Scientific) created JAWS screen reader software for blind people
- Macintosh, cofounded General Magic, cofounded Eazel
- D. Richard Hipp – created SQLite
- C. A. R. Hoare – first implementation of quicksort, ALGOL 60 compiler, Communicating sequential processes
- Louis Hodes – Lisp, pattern recognition, logic programming, cancer research
- Agile Manifestosignatory
- Grace Hopper – Harvard Mark I computer, FLOW-MATIC, COBOL
- Paul Hudak – Haskell language design, textbooks on it and computer music
- David A. Huffman – created the Huffman coding; a compression algorithm
- Roger Hui – created J
- Dave Hyatt – co-authored Mozilla Firefox
- P. J. Hyett – cofounded GitHub
I
- Miguel de Icaza – GNOME project leader, initiated Mono project
- Roberto Ierusalimschy – Lua leading architect
- Bitblt
- Geir Ivarsøy – cocreated Opera web browser
- Ken Iverson – APL, J
- Toru Iwatani – created Pac-Man
J
- Bo Jangeborg – ZX Spectrum games
- first webcam
- SpringSource
- Stephen C. Johnson – yacc
- Lynne Jolitz – 386BSD
- William Jolitz – 386BSD
- Bill Joy – BSD, csh, vi, cofounded Sun Microsystems
- Robert K. Jung – created ARJ
K
- malloc and the Beerwarelicense
- Lotus Development Corporation
- Zip (file format), authored PKZIP
- Ted Kaehler – contributions to Smalltalk, Squeak, HyperCard
- Alan Kay – Smalltalk, Dynabook, Object-oriented programming, Squeak
- Real Programmer" in the Story of Mel
- The Devil's DP Dictionary
- John Kemeny – cocreated BASIC
- ditrofftext-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)
- Tom Knight – Incompatible Timesharing System
- Jim Knopf – a.k.a. Jim Button, author PC-File flatfile database; cocreated shareware
- 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
- Cornelis H. A. Koster – Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 68, ALGOL 68 transput
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
- Tom Lane – main author of libjpeg, major developer of PostgreSQL
- Sam Lantinga – created Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL)
- Dick Lathwell – codeveloped APL\360
- Chris Lattner – main author of LLVM project
- Samuel J. Leffler – BSD, FlexFAX, LibTIFF, FreeBSD Wireless Device Drivers
- Rasmus Lerdorf – original created PHP
- Michael Lesk – Lex
- Gordon Letwin – architected OS/2, authored High Performance File System (HPFS)
- L3, L4
- Charles H. Lindsey – IFIP WG 2.1 member, Revised Report on ALGOL 68
- Cascading Style Sheets
- 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
- Analytical Engine)
- 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
- Agile Manifesto
- John Mashey – authored PWB shell, also called Mashey shell
- Yukihiro Matsumoto – Ruby
- 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
- John McCarthy – Lisp, ALGOL, IFIP WG 2.1 member, artificial intelligence
- Tomcat Catalinaservlet container
- 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
- software componentry, Unixtools (spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, tr, etc.)
- Marshall Kirk McKusick – Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), work on FFS, implemented soft updates
- Sid Meier – author, Civilization and Railroad Tycoon, cofounded MicroProse
- Bertrand Meyer – Eiffel, Object-oriented Software Construction, design by contract
- Bob Miner – co-created Oracle Database, cofounded Oracle Corporation
- Jeff Minter – psychedelic, and often llama-related video games
- James G. Mitchell – WATFOR compiler, Mesa (programming language), Spring (operating system), ARM architecture
- digital systems, developing dynamic dataflow architectures, parallel computing programming languages(Id, pH), compiling on parallel machines
- Petr Mitrichev – competitive programmer
- Cleve Moler – co-authored LINPACK, EISPACK, and MATLAB
- W3C
- Bram Moolenaar – authored text-editor Vim
- ZetaLisp
- Charles H. Moore – created Forth language
- Roger Moore – co-developed APL\360, created IPSANET, cofounded I. P. Sharp Associates
- Matt Mullenweg – 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
- Patrick Naughton – early Java designer, HotJava
- Peter Naur (1928–2016) – Backus–Naur form (BNF), ALGOL 60, IFIP WG 2.1 member
- Fredrik Neij – cocreated The Pirate Bay
- Graham Nelson – created Inform authoring system for interactive fiction
- 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
- Phiwa Nkambule – cofounded Riovic, founded Cybatar
- Peter Norton – programmed Norton Utilities
- Kristen Nygaard (1926–2002) – Simula, object-oriented programming
O
- Ed Oates – cocreated Oracle Database, cofounded Oracle Corporation
- Martin Odersky – Scala
- Peter O'Hearn – separation logic, bunched logic, Infer Static Analyzer
- Internet Relay Chat(IRC)
- Dizzy
- John Ousterhout – created Tcl/Tk
P
- Keith Packard – X Window System
- Larry Page – cofounded Google, Inc.
- Alexey Pajitnov – created game Tetris on Electronika 60
- Seymour Papert – Logo (programming language)
- David Park (1935–1990) – first Lisp implementation, expert in fairness, program schemas, bisimulation in concurrent computing
- Mike Paterson – algorithms, analysis of algorithms (complexity)
- Tim Paterson – authored 86-DOS (QDOS)
- Markus Persson – created Minecraft
- Jeffrey Peterson – key free and open-source software architect, created Quepasa
- Charles Petzold – authored many Microsoft Windows programming books
- Simon Peyton Jones – functional programming, Glasgow Haskell Compiler, C--
- sam and programming environment acme, main author of Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, co-authored Go (programming language)
- Kent Pitman – technical contributor to the ANSI Common Lisp standard
- Robin Popplestone – COWSEL (renamed POP-1), POP-2, POP-11 languages, Poplog IDE; Freddy II robot
- Tom Preston-Werner – cofounded GitHub
R
- Theo de Raadt – founding member of NetBSD, founded OpenBSD and OpenSSH
- Brian Randell – ALGOL 60, software fault tolerance, dependability, pre-1950 history of computing hardware
- T. V. Raman – specializes in accessibility research (Emacspeak, ChromeVox (screen reade r for Google Chrome)
- (The Humane Environment) program
- Open Source movement, authored fetchmail
- 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
- Dennis Ritchie – C, Unix, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Inferno
- RSAalgorithm (being the R in that name). created RC4 and MD5
- John Romero – first-person shooters Doom, Quake
- Mozilla Firefox
- Douglas T. Ross – Automatically Programmed Tools (APT), Computer-aided design, structured analysis and design technique, ALGOL X
- Guido van Rossum – Python
- Philip Rubin – articulatory synthesis (ASY), sinewave synthesis (SWS), and HADES signal processing system.
- Jeff Rulifson – lead programmer on the NLS project
- Rusty Russell – created iptables for linux
- Steve Russell – first Lisp interpreter; original Spacewar! graphic video game
- Mark Russinovich – Sysinternals.com, Filemon, Regmon, Process Explorer, TCPView and RootkitRevealer
S
- rotoscopeanimation software
- Muni Sakya – Nepalese software
- REBOL
- Chris Sawyer – developed RollerCoaster Tycoon and the Transport Tycoon series
- Cher Scarlett – Apple, Webflow, Blizzard Entertainment, World Wide Technology, and USA Today
- Bob Scheifler – X Window System, Jini
- Isai Scheinberg – IBM engineer, founded PokerStars
- GNU Maxima, GNU Common Lisp
- John Scholes – Direct functions
- Just another Perl hacker
- Adi Shamir – cocreated RSA algorithm (being the S in that name)
- Mozilla Organization
- Cliff Shaw – Information Processing Language (IPL), the first AI language
- Zed Shaw – wrote the Mongrel Web Server, for Ruby web applications
- Emily Short – prolific writer of Interactive fiction and co-developed Inform version 7
- Daniel Siewiorek – electronic design automation, reliability computing, context aware mobile computing, wearable computing, computer-aided design, rapid prototyping, fault tolerance
- Ken Silverman – created Duke Nukem 3D's graphics engine
- Bravo (the first WYSIWYG text editor), Microsoft Word
- Colin Simpson – developed CircuitLogix simulation software
- 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
- Matthew Smith – ZX Spectrum games, including Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy
- Regex
- Joel Spolsky – cofounded Fog Creek Software and Stack Overflow
- first webcam
- GDB, founder and pioneer of GNU Project, terminal-independent I/O pioneer on Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), Lisp machinemanual
- Guy L. Steele Jr. – Common Lisp, Scheme, Java
- Alexander Stepanov – created Standard Template Library
- Christopher Strachey – draughts playing program
- Ludvig Strigeus – created μTorrent, OpenTTD, ScummVM and the technology behind Spotify
- Bjarne Stroustrup – created C++
- Zeev Suraski – cocreated PHP language
- Gerald Jay Sussman – Scheme
- Herb Sutter – chair of ISO C++ standards committee and C++ expert
- Gottfrid Svartholm – cocreated The Pirate Bay
- Aaron Swartz – software developer, writer, Internet activist
- UnrealScript, ZZT
T
- Amir Taaki – leading developer for Bitcoin project
- Andrew Tanenbaum – Minix
- Pugs
- Simon Tatham – Netwide Assembler (NASM), PuTTY
- 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
- (GCC)
- Linus Torvalds – original author and current maintainer of Linux kernel and created Git, a source code management system
- Andrew Tridgell – Samba, Rsync
- Roy Trubshaw – MUD – together with Richard Bartle, created MUDs
- Bob Truel – cofounded DMOZ
- Alan Turing – mathematician, computer scientist and cryptanalyst
- David Turner – SASL, Kent Recursive Calculator, Miranda, IFIP WG 2.1 member
V
- TCP Wrapper
- Bernard Vauquois – pioneered computer science in France, machine translation (MT) theory and practice including Vauquois triangle, ALGOL 60
- DOS-Ckernel, maintainer of defunct Linux for Windows 9x distribution
- Paul Vixie – BIND, Cron
- 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
- Larry Wall – Warp (1980s space-war game), rn, patch, Perl
- Bob Wallace – author PC-Write word processor; considered shareware cocreator
- Chris Wanstrath – cofounded GitHub, created the Atom (text editor) and the Mustache template system
- John Warnock – created PostScript
- TrustedBSD project and OpenBSM
- 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
- Web3 Is Going Just Great
- Arthur Whitney – A+, K
- why the lucky stiff – created libraries and writing for Ruby, including quirky, popular Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby to teach programming
- Adriaan van Wijngaarden – Dutch pioneer; ARRA, ALGOL, IFIP WG 2.1 member
- NEMESIS Go Master
- Evan Williams – created and cofounded language Logo
- Roberta and Ken Williams – Sierra Entertainment, King's Quest, graphic adventure game
- Sophie Wilson – designed instruction set for Acorn RISC Machine, authored BBC BASIC
- Dave Winer – developed XML-RPC, Frontier scripting language
- Niklaus Wirth – ALGOL W, IFIP WG 2.1 member, Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon
- Mathematica
- Don Woods – INTERCAL, Colossal Cave Adventure
- Philip Woodward – ambiguity function, sinc function, comb operator, rep operator, ALGOL 68-R
- Steve Wozniak – Breakout, Apple Integer BASIC, cofounded Apple Inc.
- Will Wright – created the Sim City series, cofounded Maxis
- William Wulf – BLISS system programming language + optimizing compiler, Hydra operating system, Tartan Laboratories
Y
- Jerry Yang – co-created Yahoo!
- Victor Yngve – authored first string processing language, COMIT
- Nobuo Yoneda – Yoneda lemma, Yoneda product, ALGOL, IFIP WG 2.1 member
Z
- Matei Zaharia – created Apache Spark
- Jamie Zawinski – Lucid Emacs, Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, XScreenSaver
- Phil Zimmermann – created encryption software PGP, the ZRTP protocol, and Zfone
- Mark Zuckerberg – created Facebook