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Tim Bray's Top Twenty Software People in the World
jg21 writes "Although this reader-compiled list of software development's giants omits pioneers like George Boole, John Louis von Neumann, and the 'Forgotten Father of the Computer' John Vincent Atanasoff - among others - it does a pretty good job of mapping the Code Masters, from Alan Turing who gave us the algorithm, to Klaus Knopper the one-man band behind Knoppix. They're mostly here - the inventors of C, C++, C#, Java, and Python; example. There are a couple of programmers who have snuck in more for their business acumen than their programming talent, like the former Powersoft/Sybase CEO Mitchell Kertzman but otherwise the 40 nominees seem pretty 'pure' and the overall idea is to narrow the list down to the Top Twenty Software People in the World - a phrase invented by Tim Bray, who blogged that Adam Bosworth would be among them. Be careful what you wish for when blogging - looks like Bray's about to find out who the community thinks the the 19 others are."
Where be she?
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
...didn't make the list again.
Blarf.
Where's Larry Wall?
This
Come on now! Guido is on that list.
Creator and Cocreator of VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet. Come on, those spreadsheet where way better on other platforms before they made VisiCalc. Also, if it was'nt for them, someone else would had done it. Nothing special about this.
I'm finding it difficult to see any non-male names on that list. Discuss.
Do we want to forget C nowadays or so?
Knuth, like alot of these "top twenty", are just Ivory Tower acadamics with no real applications in industry. Where is Bill Gates? He bought computing to the people. Whoever made VB should also be mentioned.
...where's the cowboyneal option?
Jon Gay: The "Father of Flash"
It's a pity that, nearly half a century since Turing was driven to suicide by poison apple, being gay is still such a big issue that many coders are afraid to "come out", afraid of the intolerance, afraid of the flaming, and afraid of being looked down on by their peers.
I, personally, know several practising homosexuals on a variety of Open Source projects who simply deny their nature to fit in with the overall its-all-just-fun gay bashing "f4gg0RT" repartee on places like Slashdot and major mailing lists. They are represented at the highest levels of software development, including two major contributors and maintainers of the Linux kernel.
In many ways the subculture of Open Source software has some catching up to do: it's amateur userbase tolerates the neolithic attitudes towards women and gays that mainstream society has rid itself of years ago.
I fully expect, as usual, to be modded down for this post. Posting anonymously: had to change username to avoid harassment after the last post.
I havent gone throught the list thoroughly but of the names I have seen I havent come to notice the names of emminent personalities from the academic world. Names like that of Donald E Knuth are missing from the list. The list consists of people who have made software which went on to become big. But that wouldn't have been possible without the academic research put in.
The list is mostly of "computer pop artists". Where's McCarthy? (discoverer of lisp, the single most influential language in computing). Where's Pierce and Cardelli? Where's Church? How can you have Turing but not Church? That's stupid. It's not called the Church-Turing thesis for nothing, you know.
WTF is a shyster like de Icaza (attempted to bring the worst features of windows to linux) doing on a list with Mitch Kapor (discovered the spreadsheet)?
SysAdmins are just janitors. Its a job that requires very little skill. Scripting languages (and Perl in particular) are just toys that let SysAdmins play at being programmers.
If you really want to be a programmer, I guess you shouldn't have dropped out of high school.
...into two parts.
1. Early pioneers (Turing etc), and possibly designers of the languages (C etc) that have stood the test of time.
This list will probably be roughly the same this time next year.
2. Inventors of recent, fashionable languages & technologies (better not mention them by name though)
This list will probably look very different this time next year.
Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines Correct?
There aren't enough ads on that page, I can still see some content.
What about Knuth?
He is the worlds best programmer ever and creator
of tex and metafont systems in which most of
academic publications are done.
His works have taugth todays software engineers
algorithms data structures and algorithm analysis.
Bad that he missed out.
Charles Babbage - inventor of ther difference Engine
Ada Lovelace - first programmer
John von Neumann - random access macines
John Backus - Fortran, BNF, compiler design
Don Knuth - "The Art of Computer Programming", algorithm design
as well as McCarthy & Alan Robinson(AI), Dijstra (structured programming, semaphores), Hoare (CSP)
To make matters worse, they got wrong the only one that might actually matter: Danny Hillis founded Thinking Machines, not "Think Machines". Huge difference.
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
jg21, you must be from Iowa.
Read, L
I couldnt understand why he is not greater and more important than such as Don Ferguson: Inventor of the J2EE application server at IBM, or even Jon Gay: The "Father of Flash". ???
Is flash a ground-breaking application like 3D game/movie engine development? At least, 95% flahes i ve seen is for annoying web adverts...
... Well I don't know if all these animated Flash ads are a real progress in the computer world... But Flash surely makes more money to the author of the article than Knuth's researchs !!! Half of the /. readers could write a better list. Don't deserve an article !
At the end of the day there is no way there is a Top20. There has been so much good and bad software written some bad software even has been very innovative and often has features/taken stolen from it for better future software products.
Where is the top 100 software programmers.. that would at least be more including and give a better all round result of the industry.
What an appalling list, heavily biased to the fashionably recent. Segei Brin may be clever, but he hasn't contributed a tenth of what Don Knuth has, who isn't even on the list.
There are also complete fields that have been ignored, what about the founding gods of Graphics? Scientific programming? Logic programming? AI?
Kristen Nygaard and Ole Johan Dahl - inventors of object-oriented programming.
I've already refreshed this damn thing TWICE and no one has made a comment that I could reply wittily too. WTF?
Of course, if these had been included other people would be whining about other omissions. Also, it seems to me like there is a severe open source bias in this list. "stuff that matters" .. bleh.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
I'm not sure I agree with him getting the most "votes" at this point (scroll down the page). Excellent coder, good "top-level" thinker, but would I really put him in front of the guys who made Unix, Java, and even the web? Definitely not.
Couple people mentioned Lady Ada as the only 'token' female, but where is Adm. Grace Hopper? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper Coined the term 'bug', helped develop the idea of programming languages (as a opposed to punchcards), developer of the FIRST compiler and was instrumental in the government's understanding and subsequent funding of early digital computers.
You should expect to see some bias towards java and vaguely similar languages. Probably not many java hackers know/like lisp
Sorry I may be very ignorant but I've never heard of Pierce or Cardelli. Care to post links?
I don't know about you but I reckon this is really cool. I'd love to see who are the gun programmers at the moment.
Then again I guess by the time you find out they've already done their best work.
John Carmack...
I guarantee you these 20 people use the labor of others a lot more than they use their own labor. Why do we always obsess over people who are supposedly the best at something?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
How can some Unix and typesetting compare to the majesty of Daikatana
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
Where is Nolan Bushnell, creator of pong, which launched a generation of games that could be plugged into the TV, ancestor to the xbox, playstation, and nintendo?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I'd definitely have Peter Molyneux, John Carmack, Chris Crawford and Mike Burnham
She's intentionally left out.
It's really kind of funny. By 'forgetting' half the people of any weight whatsoever, these guys have guaranteed themselves a lot of publicity among nerds.
It's kind of like some TV shows we have in Norway, where the audience at home is encouraged to send text messages to win a prize or whatever (participation for a small fee, of course).
A lot of them involve a question being asked which is ludicrously simple. Initially, it's worded as though it's supposed to be really hard. Then they start adding hints in such a way that even the densest of watchers will feel smart when the answer dawns on them.
Which all results in a lot of money.
In this case, the money comes from the ads...look at all the sponsored links. How much have they made from this slashdotting?
whoever the heck Tim Bray is ? iam sure he is a nice fellow but his opinion counts for ?
How could you possibly forget Stephen Woston?
No WOZ, No Apple, No Visicalc, No Lotus, No PC, No etc, No etc....
How dare they omit john backus? He invented fortran, which is still the most often used language for scientific calculations. And he pioneered functional programming.
He deserves to be on top of this list for this publication alone.
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
820 A.D. whose name is where the English word "algorithm" originates. Not exactly a 'giant' but a founder.
Grace Hopper beats anyone on this list, frankly. There's more COBOL doing more real work right now (like debiting and crediting your bank accounts) than, say, Turbo Pascal and C#. (Come on.) And that's decades after her innovation.
Ada Lovelace, 189 years young.
you're absolutely right
I think it spells Dijkstra though.
Mitchell E Kertzman became a director of CNET Networks in May 1996. Mr. Kertzman is a general partner of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. From November 1998 until March, 2003, Mr. Kertzman served as Chief Executive Officer and Director of Liberate Technologies, Inc., an information appliance and software provider. From July 1996 until November 1998, Mr. Kertzman served as Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer of Sybase, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise database software, which Mr. Kertzman joined in February 1995 as Executive Vice President. Prior to joining Sybase, Inc., Mr. Kertzman served as Chief Executive Officer and a director of Powersoft Corporation, an application development tools provider.Mitchell Kertzman has been listed in Forbes' America's Most Powerful People.
Where is Al Gore on the list?
So I rtfa. The "feedback" link in the article has a pretty good list of the omissions. The list was shown to /. after the 40 choices were winnowed
out by a much smaller [and apparently less well
educated or younger] audiance than /.
/. readers have noted that the gods who gave us the
first languages like cobol and fortran and lisp are
not on the list. [Where, for instance, is Aiken whose APL spawned
two dozen derivitive languages?] If you leave the selection up to a group of readers who can stomach wall-to-wall adds and exhortations like "... In the SYS-CON tradition of empowering readers, we are leaving the final "cut" to you,..." you are going to get pretty a uninformed range of choices. I'd rather start an ASK SLASHDOT for an open ended POLL with the names /. readers have already supplied than be shown the leftovers from some narrower and less informed group.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
What about Gary Kildall (arguably father of the microcomputer operating system, in the form of CP/M)? Niklaus Wirth? Gerrit Blaauw? Blaauw is the principal designer of the System/360 Model 67 and the software (CP-67), and this was the first system to implement the VM (virtual machine) concept, at least in early form.
Or Randy Suess and Ward Christensen (first electronic bulletin board system, MODEM7, XMODEM)?
Invented the algorithm, he did not. In fact, algorithmic mathematics is the oldest form of math and was developed independenty by most ancient civilizations. If anyone deserves to be in the list as the inventor of the computer algorithm, it should be Ada Byron, as Wikipedia writes. She developed a algorithm for Babbage's Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers in - 1842!
On another note, the list is stupid. I mean, why choose the creator of SOAP, yet another (little-known?) protocol, over so many others? And who is Ann Winblad?
Eric Raymond (however controversial) definitely also deserves to be in the list.
I wouldn't want to start a flame war by implying that certain languages/technologies are passing fads :-)
Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines Correct?
I have the utmost respect for Turing, as he was a glowing example of gaining respect in the CompSci field despite prejudice (although it did end nastily). Being a part of the F/OSS community and being gay, I always have the feeling that any respect that I've gained would just trickle away if I came out. However, this seems to be an issue with the 'net in general [bar the specifically pro-gay communities] rather than just F/OSS. Being a moderator on a couple of compsec forums where we have the constant flow of kiddies wanting to "h4Xx0r teh f4g's M$N", I find it increasingly difficult to deal with such situations and control my anger without inadvertently coming out. It's especially hard when respected members do it too as this seems to make it "ok" - monkey see, monkey do. Then again, that's probably an occupational hazard of dealing with prejudice anywhere, not just the 'net.
Isn't on the list, but Klaus Knopper is? WTF?
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
Why doesn't he make the list?
I believe this list is about people who are currently influencing the world of software. That explains why people like George Boole are omitted.
"The Twenty Top Software People in the World" isn't very specific. The list seems to be mainly language designers, which strikes me as a rather perverse interpretation.
Do I get a listing for (correctly) answering John Patrick's early questions? ("Who owns the Internet?" for example.)
Other than the great Alan Turing... What happened to other greats like Edsger Dijkstra, or John Backus? These are the real greats of software.
Bob
So is this the first manual to have the venerable "Hello, World" programming example? At least in C right?
I only mod up parents of "mod parent up" posts...
Alan Kay, Steve Wozniak, Bill Atkinson, Bud Tribble, Avie Tevanian, Richard Feynman, John Warnock, Evans & Sutherland?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
How did they forget Larry Wall? Perl is the duct tape of the programming world. Slash is even written in Perl.
I don't like
This list purposely doesn't include technology-du-jour and instead focuses on those whose ideas have had long-standing impact. http://www.softwarehistory.org/history/important_p eople.html
Reading about all the exciting things these people have accomplished is really motivating.
I also miss N. Wirth
[[Category:Programmers]]
Is this story some kind of troll? They included Linux Thorvalds and Klaus Knoppix, but they left out Bill Gates :)
What about Edsger Dijkstra?
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
Early Silicon Valley VC, best known for being Bill Gates' ex-girlfriend.
http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~mbsclass/hall_of_fame/cod d.htm
Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines Correct?
This topic is really intresting, but why does the site try to hide the actual content??
welcome our 'Top Twenty Software People in the World' overlords.
I wouldn't call open source amateur because that will only annoy people. I can see what you are trying to say, the problem is that if people said some of the insults they say at work they would get fired. But when you do it online there is no real punishment. You might lose some respect from others, but noone cares really.
people just act differently online. I cant speak to some of my friends online because their such jerks, but in the flesh theyre totally different people. When I call them on it, they say everyones doing the same so it doesnt matter, its just like its part of the jargon to them.
Where is Donald Knuth?
Edgar Codd, mathematician, published in the 70es his paper "A relational model of data for large Shared Data Banks":
http://www.acm.org/classics/nov95/toc.html
SQL was then developed by Chamberlin and Ray Boyce. I see them all absent from the list.
Not list is complete without him! http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/
an excellent list
Years ahead of its time, as were its successors the B5500 and B6500/6700/6800 etc. One of the first machines designed with high level languages in mind.
http://www.ajwm.net/amayer/papers/B5000.html
Google will find loads of useful info for those interested.
I mean, he's done outstanding work on his field, but his field is merely a GNU/Linux LiveCD. And Knuth is not on the list. You've got to be kidding me.
although not an exhaustive list, its better than the one in the article summary.
*This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
Suggesting a poll idea to them probably won't do much, though.
Unbelievable that the inventor of Flash is included but none, that I can see, from the CSRG at Berkeley that designed and implemented TCP/IP, BSD etc. This list is just an expression of personal preferences rather than merits.
Bill Joy is on the list; he counts, doesn't he?
' Famous for Quattro Pro, Microsoft Access, and IE4; then BEA, now Google '
So that's who I have to blaim. I hope google's a bit more solid.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
A knock-off clone designed to kill a competitor just to ensure vendor lock-in?
Talk about low standards. Why not go straight to the top of Microsoft and just put Bill Gates on the list? Gates's business model of "make crappy software ubiquitous and charge lots of money for it" sure has had more of an effect on the world of software than some toady he selected to help him kill Java.
Is it me, or was the web page refered to by this story an absolute carbuncle on the face of the Internet? Most of it was advertisments crammed in, colourfully flashing. You had to scroll down half way before the article even started. Remove the ads, and the entire content would probably fit in a single browser window without the need to scroll... at 640x480.
A total waste of bandwidth. I'd have been very disappointed had I visited this page when I was on the move using GPRS (which you pay for by the kilobyte).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Kertzman also deserves credit for presiding over accounting scandals at both Liberate and Sybase.
I thought only people from India were allowed to program?
Oh, value of the dollar must be down.
computer.org
Why on earth aren't they on the list?
60% of the others wouldn't be there, if it wasn't for them.
(Yeah, I like to pull statistics out of thin air)
for great justice
I think Mr. Kay should positively be on that list. Where would all the Java, C# and C++ people be without Smalltalk?
Well, he purchased all twenty spaces, so there is nobody else listed.
...
Just had to add this: If Windows is an operating system, then I am Santa Claus.
As I sit at my "networked workstation" using my "graphical user interface" to program in an "object-oriented language" I wonder why the inventor of all three of these things, Alan Kay, is not on the list.
To my mind, only Bill Joy comes close to Alan Kay in terms of bredth of contributions to computer engineering.
For your convenience here is a sorted list of people according to the votes they have gotten so far:
1 151 Torvalds
2 120 Turing
3 105 Stallman
4 101 Ritchie
5 101 Berners-Lee
6 78 Thompson
7 60 Stroustrup
8 52 Kernighan
9 47 Rossum
10 45 Oreilly
11 42 Joy
12 41 Hejlsberg
13 39 Gay
14 33 Fielding
15 30 Tanenbaum
16 30 Gosling
17 29 Booch
18 28 Pike
19 27 Brin
20 25 Cutler
21 23 Bricklin
22 19 Knopper
23 19 Fowler
24 18 Icaza
25 17 Bosworth
26 15 McClannahan
27 15 Frankston
28 14 Kapor
29 14 Bloch
30 12 Ferguson
31 12 Bray
32 8 Brand
33 6 Box
34 5 Patrick
35 5 Kertzman
36 5 Hillis
37 4 Winblad
38 4 Myhrvold
39 3 Paoli
40 2 Brilliant
"In trying to make programming predictable, computer scientists have mostly succeeded in making it boring"
-- Larry Wall, interview in The Perl Journal, vol. 1 issue 1.
So is this the list of a few who cannot be left out, complemented by the boring ones?
As others have already said:
Where is Ada Lovelace? Where's Larry Wall? etc.
Maybe someone needs to start another list...
He's informed the work of many thousands, and continues to produce absolutely brilliant code. I think that in fifty years, people will still have volumes of AOCP close at hand for reference, and the developers of WinXP will be a footnote in some History of Failed Semi-Functional Operating Systems.
If that is a list of the top 40 to choose from - and many of these are not programmers at all, (perhaps they dabble in Java a bit), then I think our field has hit on hard times indeed. Knuth? Bell? Kay? SUTHERLAND????? I am not that old, but even I have a clue about the history of programming.
The list is horribly tilted towards PC applications.
It does not deal with the important roles of networking, embedded computing or methodology except in token ways.
For example, including Booch as the sole methodologist is absurd. What about Dijkstra? Wirth? Yourdon? Mellor?
The relational database and thrid normalized form also seem to be totally overlooked, even though they made the entire IT industry possible. How about Date?
Then there's networking itself. Where's Jon Postel?
It also favors originators over evolvers. K&R created a cute little macro-assembler for PDP-11s called "C". But Plauger had amore to do with its evoluation into ANSI C, the truly usable portable language with well documented and defined standard libraries.
The way you really form a list like this is you gather a much larger list of top software developers, and fight out who influenced *them*.
Seriously... WTF?
Without them, forget Windows, Mac OS X, KDE, Gnome, etc.
- Douglas Engelbart, for the mouse and many other widgets
- Alan Kay, for Smalltalk (one of the 1st OOP) and the modern GUI (icons, etc.)
- Steve Jobs, for System 1.0 (Mac OS 1), NextStep and Mac OS X
- Bill Gates, for BASIC and Windows
strcpy, providing root to hackers since 1972! -C. Jaouich
"The word algorithm comes ultimately from the name of the 9th-century Persian mathematician Abu Abdullah Muhammad bin Musa al-Khwarizmi."
This is complete nerd masturbation. The entire list is indicative of a total lack of knowledge of the history of software. It represents mainly contemporaneous candidates (i.e. within the last 15 years) some of which don't even fit the bill as "software people". Out of the 40 candidates proposed, I see only about 7 that are a solid "yes", about 10 that are a "maybe" and the rest a definite "no".
I'd like to talk to whomever came up with this list and give them a history lesson.
To miss Alan Kay is unforgivable given that he changed the way everybody programs.
What about the Gang of Four? They've had even more influence than Martin Fowler.
Fred Brooks! Enough said.
Bill Gates?
That's BS. Alan Turing looks pretty dead to me, anyway.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Another notable omission: Niklaus Wirth, designer of Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon (to name only his most influential languages), author of "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs".
He may not have been that much of a programmer, but he gave us the mouse...
Tops in the world, not tops in the ground. The guys you're complaining about are fertilizer. They're dead, Jim!
how decisions made by committee tend to be worthless.
Crappy list. sorry.
The mere fact that they left out Knuth is enough to shoot this list's credibility to hell for me. The man wrote TeX and possibly the most comprehensive and well-known volumes about computer science.
and that guy from Microsoft is just the kid-knapper.
Missing is the father of what we percieve as the modern computer, and how people interact with it.
t io n/engelbart.html
Doug Englebart.
We are still working off the incompletely realized ideas that the presented at the "Mother of All Demos".
http://www.cs.brown.edu/stc/resea/telecollabora
This idea is moronic, the list is woefully incomplete, I had nothing to with it, and they shouldn't be using my name like that.
Tamir Khason has another list that also predicts the success of a language based on author's photo
I'm guessing that he meant to say brought Any real innovation from Microsoft was bought and not invented there.....
Cowboy Neal
Computer game programmer pioneer Bunten should be on the list. She designed the first multiplayer pc games (among them M.U.L.E. and Global Conquest), and forsaw that multipler gaming and social interaction was the wave of the future. She died of cancer before the future could catch up to her.
Links for people too busy to google:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/03/18/bunte n/index.html
http://www.costik.com/dani1.html
(Yes, I am HTML impaired....)
http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=47349&page=3 9
I guess someone forgot to check his pulse. The list is a bit too focused on modern heros and very few of those with the shoulder on which we stand. Very sad that geeks have such a little appreciation for our history.
Boole, Davis-Putnam, Herbrand, ...
I don't have anything useful to contribute to the discussion, so I'm going to grammar-flame the submitter. :)
Why the heck do people use this non-word, "snuck"? Can you think of ANY word that rhymes with "sneak" whose past tense rhymes with "snuck"???
Speak -> spoke
Strike -> struck
Streak -> streaked
Leak -> leaked
Squeak -> squeaked
Peak -> peaked
Sneak -> sneaked!!
Kenneth Iverson, undoubtedly one of the brainiest people to have lived in the 20th Century, devised APL and its follow-on, J, and inspired several generations of programmers.
Sadly, he died just two months ago, and I guess that disqualifies him for this list. If it didn't, I can see several names on the list that are less worthy of commemoration than Iverson's.
British Telecom deserve a mention, after all they did invent a little thing called the hyperlink..
serenity now!
I'm not a Perl fan, but if Guido van Rossum is on the list of nominees, Larry Wall really ought to be as well.
Such list is likely to reflect a personal pet language bias. I think Lisp's founder should be on there as well. Lisp has probably influenced more dynamicly-typed languages than almost anything else, and is probably the only language from the 50's that is still considered "modern". Whether it is popular and practical or not, Lisp's impact on language design and meta-ability features is still gigantic.
Table-ized A.I.
The man you are quoting is Vinton G. Cerf.
You know, when I looked at this list, I found myself disappointed. Sure, there are some big important guys, but software is more than about applications and the big picture. It's also about the technology, and creating new abstractions. And in a lot of ways, the guy who first invented debugging is a lot more important to the success of computer science than anybody listed there.
It may be because I'm an old fart, but I remember the excitement of learning each new abstraction, either as I discovered it, or as it was invented. And it seemed to me that the creation of those abstractions are the really great deeds of computer science. Maybe nobody knows who had those break-through moments first, but I'm sure that they occured, and they seem to be to the the Great Moments in computer science.
1) The first guy to think "I shouldn't have to rewire, I should be able to write instructions that rewire it for me" - i.e., the assembler moment
2) The first guy to realize "I'm not just re-wiring this, I'm describing an procedure for it to use" - the FORTRAN moment
3) The first guy to ask "Why can't I used the same procedure from different places in my code" - the subroutine moment
4) The first guy to say "I should be able to use the subroutine in the program it already knows" - the library moment
5) The first guy to ask "Why do I have to be the one writing down the results?" - the printer moment
6) The first guy to realize "This isn't just a calculator, it's also a controller!" - the embedded moment
7) The first guy to realize "This isn't just a calculator, it's also a storage system!" - the database moment
8) The first guy to realize "This isn't just a calculator, it's also a communication system!" - the network moment
9) The first guy to realize "I'm not just submitting instructions for it to process - it's submiting instructions back for me to process!" - the interactive moment
10) The first guy to think "Why can't it do something else while its waiting?" - the multitasking moment
11) The first guy to think "Why can't it show me more context while I work?" - the full-screen moment
And finally...
12) The first guy to think "Man, why can't this thing show me some chicks?" - the porn moment
"Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest that I am hard to turn" -- A Scots-Irish prayer
But I agree with you. Kay definitely deserves mention if Gosling does. Honestly, what the hell did Gosling even do? Took C++, removed a bunch of shit from it, added garbage collection, and started passing off the result as the next great silver bullet.
However, Java, C++, and C# may very well still be where they are even without Smalltalk.
Java was based on C++, and C# was based on Java. Stroustrup got C++'s object system from Simula 67, not Smalltalk. Anyone who's used C++ and Smalltalk can see the obvious differences. In C++, every objects has a type associated with it. In Smalltalk, objects are just... objects; you can create and pass them around freely. Try implementing a collection class in C++ and then one in Smalltalk to see the difference.
Then again, Smalltalk actually popularized the paradigm to begin with, so one has to wonder if Stroustrup would have even bothered adding OO to C++ if Smalltalk wasn't so hot back then. Too bad so many of us are stuck using C++ meanwhile a perfectly good superset of C with a Smalltalk-like object system is there just waiting to be used: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C
they've always been way down on my list of technical publishers. I avoid anything they publish.
You misspelled shot.
He and his team probably had a lot of these moments 30-40 years ago.
All notable programmers in the last 20 years that write software you and I use constantly, although you probably don't even know it. Why DJB isnt on the list is completely beyond me. He wrote 20% of the world's mail servers basically by himself in a little less than a year, and then wrote a BIND replacement soon after.
It's just dmr, rms, and some users.
(And where the heck is Larry Wall?)
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
We still haven't recovered. I vote to put Bjarne on the list of top 20 Software Satans.
I thought that honor went to MS Windows?
Maybe not one of the top twenty, but certainly deserves to be nominated. He revolutionized the way C++ is used, and its influence is being felt by Java, C# and other languages.
They missed Randy Waterhouse, too. After all, he invented one of the early computers, complete with accoustic delay lines.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
because at the eight day, god created unix ;)
more deserving that Kapor, since he invented a truly new product category. Kapor invented a better mousetrap (spreadsheet) that grabbed the market away from VisiCalc.
Maybe the poster should have actually read the wiki article they posted to...
Algorithms are named after Abu Abdullah Muhammad bin Musa al-Khwarizmi. He's the father of the algorithm.
I think the confusing here is that the author thinks that algorithm is a concept that only applies to computers.
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
I don't understand why at least two guys are on the list for creating "the well" BBS.
WHat's the big deal? I mean I've heard about THe Well, since I first got online in 1988 and.. well.. I dont' see why it's that significant. That's like nominating the loser who created craigslist or even rob malda or something. What the fuck!?
Of Acorn Risc Os, ARM fame
One of the original designers of Scheme?
Primary author of Common Lisp the Language?
Co-author of C: A Reference Manual, which was the bible on writing portable C?
Co-author of The Java Language Specification?
If contributing to the design of four major programming languages doesn't get you into the top twenty, how about designing the original EMACS command set? There may be people who are better known for contributions to one language or one toolset, but it's hard to beat him for sheer breadth.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Personally I can't see a damn thing Gates has done for PC's
I would always argue that ms have actually held the industry BACK 10~20 years against their - insert drooling marketing words here - spiel.
Without ms we would still have had lean and mean software. The good guys / products would have risen to the top (as I reckon they are finally doing today). But we have waited a long time. And there is still a lot of waiting to do...
AC
If the list is from an Industry perspective (it seems to be a mixed biased perspective) it should include:
...
OS/390 creators, particularily Fred Brooks for changing the way we think about software development
Bill Gates for revolutionizing the industry and achieving world dominance while beating giant IBM into submission, he also had a bit to do with webapps
Alan Kay and team for having all the good ideas
Steve Jobs for bringing good ideas into the software realm (mouse, GUIs)
The VisiCalc dude for the first killer app
John Carmack for the first killer app video game (killer in more than one sense) and changed, revived the video game landscape
The inventor of Pong
The inventor of the RDBMS
Mark Andressen for Netscape (which changed the software world as we know it)
Linus Torvalds for Linux
Richard Stallman for GNU and its influence on the way software is built today
The creators of EJB for creating a standardized appserver companies could go for
Of course my list is industry oriented, not development oriented. For a development oriented approach I'd include:
Fred Brooks for contributions to Software Engineering
Alan Kay for OO
Pascal creator for popularizing structured programming
C creator for popularizing high level languages
Lisp creator for functional programming
Booch for UML and stuff
XP people for XP
RDBMS creator for the most successful storage mechanism to date
Martin Fowler for refactoring book
Gang of Four for Design Patterns
James Gosling for finally bringing OO to the masses (no such credit for C++ creator)
Steve Jobs for GUI programming for industry
All of the Lisp hackers have been left out. What I don't understand is why not even the mention of Paul Graham (bayesian spam filtering, yahoo stores) or Peter Norvig (AIAMA & PAIP).
Another notable omissions is Fred Brooks, chief architect for OS/360 and writer of the famous The Mythical Man-Month - though it's hard to tell what the criteria for getting on the list is...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
He only invented Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon. Pascal was only used to teach structured programming to am entire generation of students, and without Pascal there would have been no TeX or even original Mac OS. Probably the morons that voted on the list never heard of him either.
- IE4
then BEA, now Google. ???but why Grady Booch and not Ivar Jaccobson?
:-) )
... what about all the Apple guys?
.... 50% of the list are "nice to be mentioned" but the "inventor" of Knoppix ... even I as a german have to say thats nothing in comparioson to Barbara Liskov or Marvin Minsky.
UML has very little from Grady and quite a lot frm Ivar.
And while I pick on Grady (no pun intended) why hisnt he more honoured for his work on Ada? (That closes the circle to those guys who mentioned the missing original Ada
As we talked about the girls: Adele Goldman -- XEROX PARC researchtress (Smalltalk), Barbara Liskov -- research on OO programming languages and constraints in inheritance
Ah, what about Marvin Minsky? Come on
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
who do you think you are to say what Mr. Tim Bray did-or-did-not say? You probably just made this account right now... If the great **SLASHDOT** says you did than you did!
Heh, I'm just fortunate to have never done anything important enough to have people attribute crap to me. I guess it goes with the territory.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Invented the internet worm, and hence the need for network security.
Exactly, there are plenty of brilliant programmers who wrote brilliant stuff and did brilliant things whom nobody will ever hear of -- Don Eyles comes to mind, the guy who saved Apollo 11 when a bug was discovered in the LEM while it was in orbit around the Moon. Eyles got a medal. He fixed the bug, but those were the days of plated-wire memory, where you could only turn bits off. Now try fixing the bug.
Another guy saved an out-of-control Air Force weather satellite by pulling nights and weekends to recode the guidance system to use the one remaining nitrogen thrusters and the two remaining reaction wheels.
Dumb, dumb, dumb idea to try to pick any kind of "top 20." Insulting, too.
One of the *real* fathers of the Internet.
And what about the two Dartmouth profs who invented BASIC?
Should get Tim Bray and the other XML guy out of there. They did a lot of good work but XML was far from revolutionary - it was a pragmatic tailoring of SGML for the growing needs of the Web.
Is Miguel de Icaza in that list stealing the place of Knuth or is it Dijkstra?
Coinventor of awk (Perl's direct predecessor, and by extension the ancestor of Python and Ruby), and also a well-known CS researcher and the co-author of several classic texts which are still being used in classrooms
coinventor of public key cryptography, and inventor of several cryptosystems still in widespread use. Also co-author of a well-known textbook on algorithms
I would just like to comment that the webpage that TFA is on is FUCKING HORRIBLE. It's filled with ads to the point where it's hard to find the actual content among all the ads! I mean, I understand that ads are useful, good way to keep the content free, etc.. but enough is enough!!!
Alan Kay the father of OOP and the modern GUI. He has got to be the biggest omission. Plus he came up with one of my favorite quotes: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
"We need a few weeks to flesh out the system architecture, then we'll bring in the GUI people."
Interesting that the article ommitted the fact that Alan Turing was gay and committed suicide because he was persecuted by the Bristish government.
No Ada Lovelace either. Oh, and to all those who voted for Linus - seriously, you guys need to learn a bit more about computing.
A technically superficial article for the most part, it really didn't seem to understand what it purports to.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
Wow, what the hell was this guy thinking?
He included the author of a relatively new language which has had a limited impact on the CS world (though I love it, Python) and the author of a clone of a 30 year old operating system yet failed to include the author of a language which has influenced language development for decades?
This man created the most hideous of languages, and is indirectly responsible for the tremendous amount of abhorrent software plaguing us today.
Yet, the author of the fine language that is Objective C, doesn't even make the list. Unbelievable.
C is a hundred times the lanuage that C++ is, and it pains me to see these people shed in the same light.
As he mentioned in his weblog, Tim Bray had nothing to do with this list.
... the Object Oriented paradigm and the whole Windowing and GUI idea?
Smalltalk may well end up being a mere side-show in the Annals of Time 1972 page 43, but imho Alan Kay at least deserves a mention.
Other creations from Kildall's companies include Concurrent DOS (multitasking OS for PCs in the early 1980's), GEM graphical user interface (1984), and the first encyclopedia on a CD-ROM (1985).
The PBS show Computer Chronicles (which Kildall co-hosted from 1983-1988) devoted an entire show to him after his death in 1994. They even explain what "really happened" on that infamous day when IBM came calling. You can download it here: Gary Kildall Special (1995).
I highly recommend the Computer Chronicles video archive for amusing nostalgia like "Intel 386 - The Fast Lane" (1987) and "The Macintosh Computer" (1985).
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
That most of us here can name more than 20 "great programmers". I guess that's one of the beauties of the internet, you can be a celebrity in about anything these days. If we did a list of all the great propgrammers that most of the people at Slashdot have heard of, I wonder how long it would be. Would it be longer than the list of people, for example, playing in the NBA?
I'm glad to see guys like Klaus Knopper and Guido from Python get some credit, but then I wonder how both Yukihiro Matsumoto and Jordan Hubbard not only failed to make the list, but failed to get any votes at all.
I was gonna mention half your list before I saw it.
Some of the guys from the initial Mac development team set a standard that may never have been matched for internalising a complex code base.
But the Mac's very survival owed a lot to Quark who have done more to get print content computerised than any, depite being a difficult company.
Wolfram too doesn't do much to endear himself to list makers, but if you actually look at his programming as a body of work, he has no peers.
Of course I agree with other popular suggestions like Knuth, Wall and Engelbart, so maybe they'd be better trying to go from 40 to 100 rather than 40 to 20.
Games aren't my department, but the genre has had enuf influence to include 20% games programmers, starting with Crowther and Woods.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Without him NeXTSTEP would have not been. Tim Berner's Lee would have had one hell of a time developing the first WWW Browser.
All the advancements that people are wooing about in Linux, Java and IDE Development Tools were commonplace in NeXTSTEP and its development tools.
I'm sick of hearing of how that prick Von Neuman should be taking credit for the inventions of John Mauchly and Presper eckert!
/. crowd deify this faker who was only good at attaching himself to projects where the difficult work had already been done and then taking the credit for the work of the actual creators.
So many of this
The memory structure was the invention of Mauchly, the processor was created by Mauchly and Eckert. Von Neuman was a man from a "good family" who lent his name and familial credibility to the project after the questions had already been answered.
If you are going to demonstrate your ignorance by crediting Von Neuman because he was the first to make the machine publicly known, you may as well credit Gates with bringing us the internet.
Please give proper credit where credit is due, Mauchly and Eckert did invent the first general purpose computer. Von Neuman came along after and took much of the credit due these two pioneers.
Read, L
The parent is either a troll or genuinely ignorant. The story of the rise of Microsoft is famous enough that I am inclined to assume the former, although I grant that some pimply-faced high school kid might possibly be ignorant enough to sincerely espouse that view.
Internet wouldn't have proliferated to such an extent without RSA.
...it sucks so much.
two great computer scientists from the 60's : Djikstra and Amdahl. Amdahl's law is the basis of parallel programming.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
I'm not sure what defines a top person in the software world according to this list. Grady Booch defined UML, which is much loved and much hated, but I'd hardly call that a reason to be a top person. Miguel of Ximian fame is there, though I'm hard pressed to think of why. He's proven to be much more of a self-promoter and follower than a leader or innovator (Gnome, Mono).
Feels like there should be more people on here who aren't just well known, but are solving hard problems. Should writing a famous and influential piece of software 20 or 30 years ago count? (If so, where are Ken Iverson and Ivan Sutherland?) Should writing something that becames popular count, even if it isn't necessarily all that good or relevant these days?
Although it might seem strange to you, the world existed long before 1975.
In any reasonably sized list, there will always be some people who are overlooked. Don't go around bashing the makers for having some unfair criteria or for missing your hero. On the other hand, go ahead and post people who have been overlooked, but don't get pissed about it.
The author of the list is Jeremy Geelan...
al-Khwarizmi was the author of an Arabic textbook on algebra (al-Jabr appears as part of the book title). The word algorithm is a western corruption of his name which came to be applied first to the use of Hindu/Arabic numbers in computation and later to the meaning it has today.
"A History of Mathematics" Boyer/Merzbach.