Top Ten Software Innovators?

Rsriram asks: "At our company we have named some of the conference rooms with names of software innovators. The names include Ken Thompson, Donald Knuth, Ada Lovelace, Dennis Ritchie. We need to name 10 more rooms and I was wondering who Slashdot readers would think are the top ten software innovators. Not computer hardware but software. I was thinking Von Neumann, and Linus Torvalds would find a mention, What about Watts Humphrey?"

Comments

Larry Wall....

[HaloZero]

Idolize he who gave us Perl. Without perl, there would be no slashdot. o_O Think about THAT one. :p

(Actually, there probably WOULD be a Slashdot-esqe place, if not Slashdot simply done in a different language... BUT STILL!) It are Slashdot. We lubble slashdot. *hugs teh Slashdot*

what about

[Prowl]

tim berners-lee
alan turing
larry wall
bill gates ??
steve wozniak
jay miner

Re:what about

[stevew]

I'd agree with gates being here - he hacked together a reasonable Basic for uP's before anyone else did. (I lived through the era ;-)
I can't agree with Woz MOSTLY because he is really a superb Hardware hacker. His software hacking ain't shabby - but his innovations were mostly in the hardware world.

Woz

[calumr]

Steve Wozniak gets my vote.

John Carmack

[Electrum]

John Carmack started the genre of 3D games on the PC. When it comes to games, who else do you think of?

My top ten

[Koos Baster]

My favorites:

Jeff Minter
E.W. Dijkstra
Donald Knuth
Niclaus Wirth
Richard Stallman
Bjarne Stroustrup
Linus Torvalds
Miquel d'Icaza
Wouter van Oortmerssen
Larry Wall

how about...

[NemoX]

The folowing has some people: softwarehistory important people

Also, Ada Lovelase (Byron) assited Charles Babbage. How about: John von Newmann ("von Newmann architecture"), John Backus (FORTRAN), Niklaus Writh (Pascal), Dan Bricklin/Bob Frankston (first spreadsheet - VisiCalc),

IMO, Bill Gates is not an inovator, he is a buisiness man who invented nothing that wasn't already on the market in the 80's.

Some cool people

[__past__]

• Edsger Dijkstra, for stuff ranging from the shortest-path algorithm to "Basic considered harmful".
• Turing and Babbage for the fundaments of CS
• Alan Kay, inventor of smalltalk and the term "Object-Oriented Programming"
• Fred Brooks, author of the Mythical Man Month
• J. McCarthy, who developed Lisp by accident

Re:Some cool people

[__past__]

Duh. GOTO is harmful. Basic only makes you mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

my votes

[Ender Ryan]

Larry Wall - This guy is great. He created Perl, a fun, interesting language with great obfuscation potential! - disclaimer: I earn a living writing Perl ;-)

John Carmack - Doom, Quake, Q3A engine, etc. Plus he works on rockets! John Carmack has done a lot to promote the state of computing today. Just look at how people benchmark PCs, "I got 1.5 trillion fps in Q3A dude!"

Linus Torvalds - He gave us the last piece to a free *nix. Who knows what would have happened to the GNU project without him.

Richard Stallman - He started the GNU project. He also should probably be awarded a medal for the most misunderstood person in the industry. There is an equal amount of FUD directed at him as there is directed at GNU/Linux from Microsoft.

Steve Wozniak - Come on, you can't forget this guy!

Steve Jobs - Now here is someone who has had an interesting career. He's also the guy who started the push to make software "pretty". Just look at OS X.

There's plenty of others.

Grace Hopper is a good one

[budalite]

Grace Murray Hopper (bio can be found at The History of Computing ), generally credited with "developing the first compiler and who led the effort in the 60's to develop COBOL." Cool lady.

Dijkstra

[Hard_Code]

How about the recently late Edsger Dijkstra.

The day he passed, I printed out and tacked this quote to my cube:

"I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself, "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well that would be enough immortality for me"
--Edsger Dijkstra

Herman Hollerith

[jjcohen]

The father of the punchcard

Define innovators

[Ivan Raikov]

With the exception of Donald Knuth, all of the names you list are of people who had mostly engineering contributions, as opposed to bringing scientific advancements in the field (although the two are somewhat related). Did you mean to exclude the people who created and formalized computer science? If not, then you most definitely want to include Alan Turing, Edsger Dijsktra, C. Antony R. Hoare, Niklaus Wirth, and Marvin Minsky.

Re:Obvious

[nelsonal]

I enjoyed reading the flames on his articles, so I left him on, and I haven't seen an article from him for months. I think the Commodore toting kid in Afghanistan was the final nail in his coffin.

$0.02

[Viqsi]

Here's a few I'd want to second:

Adm. Grace Hopper
Bill Atkinson
Bill Joy
John Carmack
James Gosling
Tim Berners-Lee

I hesitate a bit to put Richard Stallman on that list; arguably his is more of a social creation.

Douglas Engelbart

[Andrew Lockhart]

Taken from the MouseSite:

"...Engelbart and a group of young computer scientists and electrical engineers he assembled in the Augmentation Research Center at SRI were able to stage a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration of a networked computer system. This was the world debut of the computer mouse, 2-dimensional display editing, hypermedia--including in-file object addressing and linking, multiple windows with flexible view control, and on-screen video teleconferencing."

Basically Engelbart came up with the concept of the modern GUI and the means by which most people interact with it. While not strictly a software innovation I would consider this as falling under your criteria as its affect has been widespread.