See programmer for a definition.
- Clifford Adams: strn, UseModWiki
- Bill Atkinson: Apple Macintosh Finder, HyperCard
- Tim Berners-Lee: HTTP, HTML, www (the first Web browser)
- Dan Bricklin: VisiCalc, Demo
- John Carmack: Doom, Quake
- Alan Cox: Made significant improvements to Linux
- Ward Cunningham: WikiWiki
- Dave Cutler: Windows NT, VMS
- Miguel de Icaza: GNOME
- Bill Gates: Altair BASIC, Apple II BASIC; founded Microsoft.
- James Gosling: Java, Gosling Emacs, NeWS
- Grace Hopper: Navy Mark I computer, COBOL
- Bill Joy: BSD, vi; founded Sun Microsystems
- Mitch Kapor: Lotus 1-2-3; founded Lotus Development Corporation
- Brian Kernighan:AWK (co-author)
- Donald E. Knuth: TeX, CWeb, The Art of Computer Programming
- Ada Lovelace: First programmer (of Babbage Machines)
- Yukihiro Matsumoto: Ruby
- John McCarthy: LISP
- Bertrand Meyer: Eiffel, Object-oriented Software Construction, Design by contract
- Jeff Minter: Psychodelic, and often llama-related video games
- Chuck Moore: Forth
- Eric S. Raymond: fetchmail, The Cathedral and the Bazaar
- Dennis Ritchie: C, Unix
- Guido van Rossum: Python
- Richard Stallman: Emacs, GCC, GNU
- Guy Steele: Common Lisp, Scheme
- Bjarne Stroustrup: C++
- Tim Sweeney: The Unreal engine, UnrealScript
- Ken Thompson: Unix, B (precursor of C)
- Linus Torvalds: Originated the Linux kernel
- Andrew Tridgell: Samba, Rsync
- Larry Wall: rn, patch, Perl
- Niklaus Wirth: Pascal
- Steve Wozniak: Breakout, Apple Integer BASIC; founded Apple Computer (with Steve Jobs)
- Jamie Zawinski: Lucid Emacs, Netscape, Mozilla, XScreensaver
- Paul Graham: Yahoo! Store, On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp