List of programmers
This is a list of programmers notable for their contributions to software, either as original author or architect, or for later additions.
See also: List of computer scientists
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
A
- Clifford Adams - author of the UseModWiki wiki software
- Eric Allman - sendmail, syslog
- Bill Atkinson - QuickDraw, HyperCard
B
- Donald Becker - Linux Ethernet drivers, Beowulf clustering
- Sir Tim Berners-Lee - inventor of the World Wide Web
- Brian Behlendorf - Apache
- Daniel J. Bernstein - djbdns
- David Bradley - coder on the IBM PC project team who wrote the Control-Alt-Delete keyboard handler, embedded in all PC-compatible operating systems
- Dan Bricklin - co-creator of VisiCalc, the first personal spreadsheet program
C
- Steve Capps - co-creator of Macintosh and Newton
- John Carmack - first person shooters Doom, Quake
- Steve Chamberlain - BFD, Cygwin
- Alan Cox - a developer of the Linux kernel
- Brad Cox - Objective-C
- Ward Cunningham - inventor of the WikiWiki concept
- Dave Cutler - architect of Windows NT, VMS
D
- L. Peter Deutsch - Ghostscript
- Edsger Dijkstra - ALGOL, Shortest Path First, 'GOTO considered harmful'
E
F
- Jay Fenlason - original hack, GAS
G
- Bill Gates - Altair BASIC, Apple II BASIC, founded Microsoft
- John Gilmore - GDB
- James Gosling - Java, Gosling Emacs, NeWS
- Paul Graham - Yahoo! Store, On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp
- Ralph Griswold - co-creator of SNOBOL and creator of Icon programming language.
H
- Cecil Hastings - wrote the classic Approximations for Digital Computers 1950s formulas for sin, cos, etc.
- Andy Hertzfeld - co-creator of Macintosh, co-founder of General Magic
- C. A. R. Hoare - first implementation of quicksort, Algol 60 compiler
- Grace Hopper - Navy Mark I computer, FLOW-MATIC (which heavily influenced COBOL)
I
- Miguel de Icaza - GNOME project leader
J
- Bo Jangeborg - ZX Spectrum games
- Steven C. Johnson - yacc
- Lynne Jolitz - 386BSD
- William Jolitz - 386BSD
- Bill Joy - BSD, vi; founded Sun Microsystems
K
- Mitch Kapor - Lotus 1-2-3, founded Lotus Development Corporation
- Stan Kelly-Bootle - Manchester Mark I, The Devil's DP Dictionary
- Brian Kernighan - AWK (co-author)
- Donald E. Knuth - TeX, CWEB, The Art of Computer Programming
L
- Michael Lesk - Lex
- Ada Lovelace - First programmer (of Babbage Machines)
M
- Yukihiro Matsumoto - Ruby
- John McCarthy - Lisp
- Douglas McIlroy - Unix tools
- Kirk McKusick - BSD
- Bertrand Meyer - Eiffel, Object-oriented Software Construction, Design by contract
- Jeff Minter - Psychedelic, and often llama-related video games
- Dave Moon - MacLisp, ZetaLisp
- Chuck Moore - Forth
- Urban Mueller - Brainfuck language
N
O
- Andrew and Philip Oliver, The Oliver Twins - Many ZX Spectrum games including Dizzy
P
- Alexey Pajitnov - inventor of the game Tetris on the Electronica 60
- Charles Petzold - author of many Microsoft Windows programming books
Q
R
- Eric S. Raymond - fetchmail, The Cathedral and the Bazaar
- Dennis Ritchie - C, Unix
- Mark Rochkind - SCCS, see SCM
- Guido van Rossum - Python
S
- Bill Schelter - GNU Maxima, GNU Common Lisp
- Cliff Shaw - IPL, the first AI language
- Charles Simonyi - Hungarian notation, Microsoft Word
- Henry Spencer - C-News,Regex
- Richard Stallman - Emacs, GCC, GNU
- Guy Steele - Common Lisp, Scheme
- Bjarne Stroustrup - C++
- Gerald Jay Sussman - Scheme
- Tim Sweeney - The Unreal engine, UnrealScript, ZZT
T
- Andrew Tanenbaum - Minix
- Avie Tevanian - author of the Mach kernel
- Ken Thompson - Unix, B (precursor of C)
- Michael Tiemann - GCC
- Linus Torvalds - original author of the Linux kernel
- Andrew Tridgell - Samba, Rsync
U
V
W
- Larry Wall - warp, rn, patch, Perl
- David Wheeler - invented the subroutine
- Niklaus Wirth - Pascal
- Don Woods - INTERCAL, Colossal Cave Adventure
- Steve Wozniak - Breakout, Apple Integer BASIC, founded Apple Computer (with Steve Jobs)
X
Y
Z
- Egon Zakrajšek - pioneer of computer science in Slovenia, texbooks for Z-23 assembler, structran
- Jamie Zawinski - Lucid Emacs, Netscape, Mozilla, XScreensaver