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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's Larry Wall?
This
Do we want to forget C nowadays or so?
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)?
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)
Yeah, these "top ten" lists are a crock.
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?
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?
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.
Sorry, a lot of people consider TeX to be a very important, "real application". So what if the industry it is most important to (production of technical documents) is one that you don't consider important?
Gates' programming work is all highly derivitive. He mainly worked on MS's BASIC interpreter, I believe. Nothing brilliant. You'll note, however, that Dave Cutler, author of the Windows NT kernel (and thus Win2K and WinXP by extension) _is_ on the list. That's software to the people.
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?
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.
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
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.
On this note I'd like to give a shout out of Sid Meier for very obvious reasons. I also agree with Carmack. Frankly, I don't think the list is long enough. We're missing the big names from 100 years ago.
Well anyway the response on slashdot has all been like this so these people obviously haven't been forgotten.
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)
yeah, we all remember that before MS the computing market was entirely lead by nice companies with nothing but users interest in mind - and with very cheap, very accessible and very open non-proprietary software and os'es. And with no money and marketing budgets or sales forces. Those where the days.
[sigh] Nice straw man. I never said that the various other companies competing for market share in the PC and application space were nice guys. But the fact that there was competition forced them to maintain certain standards. Microsoft held pretty much unchallenged power for long enough (roughly a decade) that they could get away with making lousy products and treating users like shit and still make lots of money, and on the occasions that someone else (and it was always someone else, never Microsoft that I can recall) did something genuinely innovative and/or high-quality, Microsoft's response was to put out an inferior ripoff, use the power of their name to crush the competing company, and continue business as usual. This is all Microsoft has ever done, all it does, and probably all it will ever do.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
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
Sorry, but Sid Meier goes on a list of top game designers, not programmers.
Civ was not amazing software, it was an amazing game.
Quake and Doom, on the other hand, were revolutionary from a programming perspective. Game wise, it was pretty trivial: shoot the other guy.
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.