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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
I'm finding it difficult to see any non-male names on that list. Discuss.
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)
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...
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?
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.
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.
Where is Al Gore on the list?
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.
Only living people are on this list, so Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace, and Alan Turing are disqualified.
OTOH, the only reason to have Ann Winblad is to piss off Bill Gates - his ex-girlfriend is here; he isn't.
Arguably Bill did more for personal computers than most anyone else out there.
/. may be too young to remember this, but there used to be lots of different choices for PC's -- and by "different" I mean genuinely different, not just the rather trivial difference between companies that build "Made for Microsoft Windows(tm)" boxes with "Intel Inside(r)". And in those days, Microsoft was just some company that wrote a lousy OS for IBM.
... well, you probably know the rest.
Very arguably. Personally I can't see a damn thing Gates has done for PC's (in the generic sense) -- Microsoft's entire strategy, from the very beginning, has been to hijack existing markets rather than pioneering new ones.
A lot of people on
And then, a while later, there were lots of choices among word processors, spreadsheets, etc., and Microsoft's products were considered inferior knockoffs. But they were the people who wrote that lousy OS for IBM, so the suits bought their products, and
The Net, and especially the Web, were the killer app for PC's, what finally made them as much a part of Joe Sixpack's home as a refrigerator and a TV. Once again, Microsoft had nothing to do with the development -- but they did have enough money to jump in with both feet once the market was established. No innovation, no research, nothing of value to anyone except Microsoft itself.
We are finally, slowly, thanks to Apple's mild resurgence and (probably more important in the long run) the growth of Linux, getting to the point where there is real competition in the PC world. But Bill G. has been its enemy at every turn.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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
You misspelled shot.