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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?"
Your choice about linus is a good one, what can you say bar he has even Microsoft flapping...maybe deviating a bit but Richard Stallman? He and the FSF group have had a lasting effect on software...i'd class that as good reason :)
"What do you mean you have no ice? Do you expect me to drink this coffee hot?" - Random Customer, Clerks
Linus and Stallman would be definites... and, shoot, what is the name of the Mozilla guy?
If you wanted to go more "classical" you could do people like Blaise Pascal or Dikstra or even Turning.
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*
Informatus Technologicus
tim berners-lee
alan turing
larry wall
bill gates ??
steve wozniak
jay miner
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
My personal favorite: Dijkstra
Steve Wozniak gets my vote.
John Carmack started the genre of 3D games on the PC. When it comes to games, who else do you think of?
Anders Hejlsberg the creator of C# (and Delphi?)
:)
- the "Hejlsberg" room
Larry Wall the creator of Perl
- the "wall" room?
Alan Cooper "father of VB"
- the "Closet"?
Think of the US military engineers that actually built the von Neumann architecture, before it was known under his name or indeed known by him. von Neumann published it first, and when the engineers found out they decided to publish to get credit. But their paper was stopped by the US military. This according to at least one account
The Book ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer seems to give one opinion on who actually did what.
. Not computer hardware but software. I was thinking Von Neumann, and Linus Torvalds would find a mention
Linus Torvalds should not be on such a list. Tananbaum was wrong to say that Linux is obsolete, but he was correct that it is of little academic interest. Linus' skill is not in innovation, it is in execution and dare I say it, project management.
Von Nuemann and the others you mentioned were theorists, people on the science side of computer science, who developed new theories. They changed the way people think about the whole field.
He wrote the first web browser and server
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
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.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Alan Kay, Doug Englebart, Will Wright, Chris Crawford, Doug Lenat, Jay Forrester, Ivan Sutherland
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.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
How could anyone forget him. And what about Chuck Moore, inventor of FORTH? :-)
Stick Men
How about the guys who codified design patterns in the classic Design Patterns book? While I don't think you would really want to take up four of your rooms with each of their names you could just call it the Gang of Four room.
You could also nominate James Gosling the Java guy. While I wouldn't really call Java all that innovative it has had a revolutionary impact like Larry Wall and Perl. I think you would more want names that when people say, "what did they guy who this room is named after do?" and you tell them to look it up they will be better coders for it. Thats why I nominate the Gang of Four name.
In Republican America phones tap you.
That's like saying that Da Vinci wasn't a good engineer compared to what he did in the arts.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
How about Brian Kernhigan?
I know this doesnt exactly fit, but Jon Postel deserves an honor too.
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.
Uhm... how the hell did he make it into that list?
I've suffered under his misguided, outdated and usually just plain wrong ideas about process management. I've also met him and it simply confirmed the fact that this guy hasn't had an original idea in his life. He is so rigid and clueless that he shouldn't be allowed near a software company.
Two projects. One run using his Team Software Process, the other run using a very watered down version of XP. The Team Software Process project was months late and was full of bugs. The XP project was delivered on time even though it was staffed with only about 80% of the manpower that was planned for.
MMhhhh... might I suggest the Watts Humphrey Urinal?
People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.
John Carmack
Alan Cox
Bill Joy
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
How could you include Dennis Ritchie, but exclude
Brian Kernighan?
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
No flame retardant suit will protect me from this, so I might as well just say it. Bill Gates was one hell of a software innovator, we (the /. crowd) just don't typically like him. Come on, he wrote a cheap, simple OS that was easy for the masses to use. He helped make computers popular by providing a simple interface that my grandmother can figure out. Without Windows, you wouldn't have had Quake or Doom or Civ or any of the other games because they wouldn't have been written...without the home market, those games wouldn't have been economically viable.
A good portion of us owe our careers and hobbies to Gates since he allowed the home user access to a PC with a simple OS. While I don't think his OS is great, his innovation is remarkable.
--trb
Here's a brief profile on Apple.com: http://www.apple.com/creative/stories/atkinson/
No sig? Sigh...
I aggree, why did Linus make it into the list 'modern saints' instead of RMS.
Sure Linus has done a fine job, but RMS's contribution is GPL and the FSF which is far greater (and more saintly).
RMS has been the most effective libertarian of modern times, people say what if the Nazis had won the war, well what if RMS hadn't have bothered.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Adm. Grace Hopper
utter rubbish
From http://www.nb.net/~lbudney/linux/bsd.html
With regards to GNU/HURD... I dunno, maybe, it's impossible to say.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Without Windows, you wouldn't have had Quake or Doom or Civ or any of the other games because they wouldn't have been written[...]
Funny that all three games that you mention actually worked under DOS; Quake and Doom used Watcom's DOS4GW protected-mode extender, which in itself was a patch for the hugely pathetic x86/DOS "platform." And no, DOS wasn't written by Microsoft, sorry. So I'm still waiting for you to point one, ONE original idea by Microsoft.
Bush Lies Watch
The day he passed, I printed out and tacked this quote to my cube:
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The father of the punchcard
Dave Cutler, architect of RSX-11, VMS, and Windows NT. (For better and worse, in that order!)
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.
Bush Lies Watch
A) One of the first computer professionals.
B) Documented the first hardware 'bug' (literally, a bug).
C) Among those responsible for one of the first extremely popular programming languages: COBOL.
D) Looks like a sweet old grandmother in a Navy Uniform.
E) The exception that proves the rule that all computer geeks are adolescent guys.
F) Participated in both the private and governmental sectors. Truly a public servant.
My father is a blogger.
sPh
Memory fails me at the moment, but the man who developed the whole concept of relational databases... worked at IBM as I recall, and cape up with the concept of ACID: Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, Durable. I'm hoping a fellow /.'er can come up with the name for me (a quick google came up empty.) Imagine where'd we be today without RDBs!
You're right, I should have said "without Microsoft", not "without Windows". That withstanding, you would have been hardpressed to buy a computer in the mid/late 80s and early 90s that didn't have a Microsoft operating system installed on it. If it wasn't MS-DOS, it was probably licensed from Microsoft. The only occasional exceptions were DRDOS and PCDOS, which you didn't see too terribly often. Yes, there were other OS's that could run games, but they weren't popular, and 99% of the gaming population didn't play games on them, they played on MS platforms.
--trb
Miguel de Icaza
Celebrate the finer things in life
Not to be politically correct, but I think Rear Admiral Grace Hopper should definitly be on the list. After all she wrote the first compiler, A-O, then the successor FLOW-Matic, which then lead to COBOL. You can get a really good idea of all of her contributions to programming here.
Um. Both Doom and Civilization came out before windows. They ran natively in DOS, which although microsoft
get 0wned. irc.w30wnzj00.com
Yes, troll, you would be hardpressed to have found a computer without MSDOS on it. That's because they had a monopoly handed to them, and they weren't afraid to use it. Heavy-handed and often illegal tactics, licensing extortion, and every other scheme Satan himself would be proud of, were used to great effect to retard the advance of the personal computer and technology innovation. Without a Microsoft, we might have the OS now, that we won't have for another 20 years. Thanks Microsoft, for slowing down everything.
Our only consolation might be that hardware is more advanced than it would have been otherwise, it had to compensate for software's weakness.
Mike Muuss was the author of PING which is found on nearly every system on the internet. PING is an excellent example of an open source contribution. From the website:
Sadly, Mike Muuss was killed in an automobile accident on November 20, 2000. His work lives on in testament to his intellect and indomitable spirit -- Lee A. Butler
While there is some controversy over this, it is *generally* accepted (at least in my circles) that Ted Nelson who founded the Xanadu project many, many moons ago.
I had the opportunity to speak with Ted on several occassions in Tokyo several years back and I must say that he is one of the most eccentric human beings I have ever met. In the first meeting he plopped a giant tape recorder on the table and then, in the midst of the discussion, pulled out a camcorder and started recording me while I spoke. The man records *everything* for some future purpose. Amazing, really.
Gates is a good businessman ("good" in the sense of making money, not in the sense of "good business") and has lots of chutzpah, but he's no innovator. He's not even a good programmer.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
... inventor of the computer mouse, shared-screen teleconferencing, hypermedia, groupware, and lots of other stuff.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
What excellent language would that be?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
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.
--
viqsi - See "vixen"
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
In a similar vein it is not clear if Linus is special either. There were dozens of Unix clones coming out at the same time and he was lucky it was his that won.
Possibly Bill Gates did do some innovation with the Basic interpreter before 1980. It seems that he pushed for using the same interpreter on different computers, while most manufacturers were attempting to make their own incompatable version. That could be considered quite important.
Yes! Definately Kernighan and Ritchie! People may say that Unix and C are no big deal, but the ability to simplify things down to a useful and easy to understand core is extremely important and the real reason why they succeeded. And unfortunately this ability seems to be missing today. We should all be running Plan9 with 17 system calls, not Linux with hundreds of system calls.
Marin Fowler: Refactoring. Making code Maintainable.
Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides: AKA the Gang of Four
Kent Beck:
John Galt:
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
He co-invented exactly what 'cher doing here, using a computerized bulletin board system or CBBS. While Randy Suess built the S-100 Z80 computer, Ward wrote CBBS in assembler in less than a month one snowy Chicago winter in 1975.
Ward later wrote the MODEM protocol which was the first file transfer protocol.
When I started sniffing around the computign scene we found that a lot of the things utilties that you needed to do things were already written and given away by Ward Christensen. He also invented freeware.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
I think that you should include Gary Kildall before any of the people that are alive. You can check more on: http://www.digitalcentury.com/encyclo/update/kilda ll.html
I can't believe nobody has mentioned Ted Nelson, inventor of hypertext and hypermedia.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
whatever manager it is that lets you sit around pondering what to name your Conference rooms. Sounds like a pretty innovative concept.
His major contribution, however, is that he was one of the first to actually sell software to end-users. Untill then, software was either free, or it was paid for by the manufacturer of the computer (who would make it free - why else would somebody buy their incompatible computer?).
I may be wrong, but wasn't Dijkstra's famous paper entitled "GoTo Considered Harmful"?
-- jimmycarter
Funny, I found it quite easy to get mine with DrDos instead, I just asked and they said OK.
Admittedly DrDos came in a box and I had to wipe MsDos to install it but that was was the point. DrDos was much better than MsDos...
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
Al Gore
Moderate me down if you want, trolls. I still find it funny.
-- jimmycarter
How about Philip Katz the inventor of PK-Zip
The internet would not be the same without Zip compression, and he made the software Shareware.
Kilroy was here!
Don't forget the (defunct) Dave Cutler Fan Club .
cpeterso
"...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.
For creating all the NIC drivers we use on our Linux boxen!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I ask because it seems there are two classes of people: Those who have done a lot of theory work (Alan Turning), and those who are famious for modern programs (Linus). If you have a nateral division it would be worth using this seperation, even if it means renaming current rooms. (I'd retire the old names though, otherwise people will end up in the old room by habbit)
John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, inventors of BASIC.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
has fought hard for our Freedom to Innovate! Surely he deserves a room of his own!
[o]_O
hopper for programming the Mark I, her first assignment sounds like the personification of the hacker mindset.
hillis for parallelism. it has had a profund effect on the way we build software.
see you in the Hopper or up by the Hills!, also check out Out of Their Minds a collection of profiles of 15 amazing Computer Scientists.
four-oh-four
Of Turing and Von Neuman etc The King is Ken Thompson.
The reason is several fold.
1 - He was part of the team that invented C.
2 - He invented UNIX. Think about it. He invented UNIX. Everybody moons over Linus and ESR but Thompson INVENTED UNIX.....
3 - When I was getting my first computer education at Humber College in the mid seventies we were that taught everything was cut into 80 byte chunks, to fit the cards we were using. Even HASP (Houston Automatic Spooling Program) we used on the big 10 MB kettle-like 3030 disks on the IBM 370-145 computer spooled our cards in 80 byte chunks. I knew it was bullshit even then but I didn't have the education to do anything about it, but KT did. HE turned everything into a bit stream, and I think the UNIX people here will back me up on this.
With UNIX, everything is a bit stream. The card reader is a bit stream, the disk drive is a bit stream, everything is a bit stream.
And you know what? The mp3s you make are also a bit stream and nothing is allowed to interfere with the free flow of bit streams between computers that want them to flow.
Today's compressed music P2P piracy philosophy is created entirely by this concept. By the way - in his WIRED interview KT mentioned compressed a compressed music format called PAC. Apparently he turned that into a C program too, from FORTRAN. It's better than MP3, too. So why isn't it out there?
He also did multi processor computer chess, the precursor of Deep Whatever, that's today's best chess machine.
Is there ANYTHING KT hasn't hugely improved or even made practical where it wasn't before?
KT is the shit. He dwells upon Mount Olympus. He's number one on this list, or there better be a damn good reason why not.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
sPh
Note: This list is biassed towards theoreticians and programming language/compiler people. In no particular order:
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