Wanted: 19 More of the Top Software People in the World
No sooner had we begun our reader-driven quest for the top twenty software people in the world than we find, thanks to energetic and insightful reader input, that it would definitely be advantageous if we now extend the field from forty...to over a hundred.
Here we bring you a sneak peek at the sixty that we'll be adding now to the poll, with thanks to everyone who has proferred additional suggestions. Even 100 won't do this subject justice, for sure, but it will be interesting to see how the i-Technology community decides to rank them, when voting on this expanded group begins in February.
The 60 Additions
Gene Amdahl: Implementer in the 60s of a milestone in computer technology: the concept of compatibility between systems
Marc Andreessen: Pioneer of Mosaic, the first browser to navigate the WWW; co-founder of Netscape
Charles Babbage: Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1828; inventor of the 'calculating machine'
John Backus: Inventor (with IBM) of FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) in 1956
Kent Beck: Creator of JUnit and pioneer of eXtreme Programming (XP)
Bob Bemer: One of the developers of COBOL and the ASCII naming standard for IBM (1960s)
D J Bernstein: Author of qmail
Fred Brooks: Co-creator of OS/390, helping change the way we think about software development
Luca Cardelli: Implementer of the first compiler for ML (the most popular typed functional language) and one of the earliest direct-manipulation user-interface editors
Vincent Cerf: "The Father of the Internet," co-inventor with Robert Kahn of the first Internetworking Protocol, TCP
Brad Cox: Father of Objective-C
Alonzo Church: Co-creator with Alan Turing of the "Church-Turing Thesis"
Alistair Cockburn: Helped craft the Agile Development Manifesto
Edgar (Ted) Codd: "Father of Relational Databases," inventor of SQL and creator of RDBMS systems
Larry Constantine: Inventor of data flow diagrams; presented first paper on concepts of structured design in 1968
Ole-Johan Dahl: Developer (with Kristen Nygaard) of SIMULA, the first object-oriented programming language.
Tom DeMarco: A principal of the computer systems think tank, Atlantic Systems Guild
Theo de Raadt: Founder of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects
Edsger W. Dijkstra: One of the moving forces behind the acceptance of computer programming as a scientific discipline; developer of the first compilers
Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript; Chief Architect of the Mozilla Project
Robert Elz: University of Melbourne Department of Computer Science
Richard P. Feynman: Legendary physicist and teacher, teacher of Caltech course 1983-86 called Potentialities and Limitations of Computing Machines
Bill Gates: Chief Software Architect (and Lord High Chief Everything Else) of "the world's #1 company" (Hoovers.com)
Adele Goldberg: Developer of SmallTalk along with Alan Kay; wrote much of the documentation
Andy Hertzfield: Eazel developer and Macintosh forefather
Grace Murray Hopper: Developer of the first compiled high level programming language, COBOL
Jordan Hubbard: One of the creators of FreeBSD; currently a manager of Apple's Darwin project
Jean D Ichbiah: Principal designer, Ada language (1977)
Ken Iverson: Inventor of APL, later J
William Kahan: "The Old Man of Floating-Point;" primary architect behind the IEEE 754 standard for loating-point computation
Robert Kahn: Co-inventor with Vincent Cerf of the first Internetworking Protocol, TCP
Mike Karels: System architect for 4.3BSD
Alan Kay: Inventor of SmallTalk
Gary Kildall: Author of the archetpical OS known as CP/M (control Program for Microcomputers)
Donald Knuth: "Father of Computer Science" - author of The Art of Computer Programming; inventor of TeX, allowing typesetting of text and mathematical formulas on a PC
Butler Lampson: Architect of Cedar/Mesa; Implementer of Xerox Alto
Robert C. Martin: Agile software development proponent; CEO, president, and founder of Object Mentor
Yukihiro Matsumoto ("Matz"): Creator of Ruby
John McCarthy: Creator, with his graduate students, of Lisp
Doug McIlroy: Head of department at Bell Labs where UNIX started
Bob Metcalfe: Creator of Ethernet
Chuck Moore: Inventor of Forth, a high-level programming language
Andrew Morton: Linus's No. 2 in the kernel group
Ted Nelson: Creator of the Xanadu project - universal, democratic hypertext library; precursor to the WWW
Kristen Nygaard: Developer (with Ole-Johan Dahl) of SIMULA, the first object-oriented programming language.
Peter Pag: Pioneer of 4GLS (1979); developed Software AG's Natural
Bob Pasker: founder of WebLogic, author of the first Java Application Server
Benjamin Pierce: Harvard University faculty member for 49 years; recognized in his time as one of America's leading mathematicians
P J Plauger: Chair of the ANSI C committee
Jon Postel: "The 'North Star' Who Defined the Internet"
John Postley: Developed Mark IV (1967), the first million dollar software product, for Informatics
Martin Richards: Designer of the BCPL Cintcode System
Martin Roesch: Author of the open-source program Snort in 1998
Gurusamy Sarathy: Heavily involved in maintaining the mainstream releases of Perl for the past 7 years
Carl Sassenrath: Author of REBOL, a scripting language
Guy L. Steele: Author of athoritative books and papers on Lisp
W. Richard Stevens: "Guru of the Unix Gurus"; author and consultant
Ivan Sutherland: Considered by many to be the creator of Computer Graphics
Avadis (Avie) Tevanian: Chief Software Technology Officer, Apple
Guy (Bud) Tribble: One of the industry's top experts in software design and object-oriented programming
Patrick Volkerding: Creator of Slackware Linux
Larry Wall: Author of Perl
John Warnock: Inventor of PostScript; CEO of Adobe Systems
Michael "Monty" Widenius: Creator of MySQL
Nicklaus Wirth: Inventor of Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon
Stephen Wolfram: Scientist, creator of Mathematica
Jamie Zawinski: Instrumental in the creation of Lucid Emacs (now XEmacs)
The Original 40
