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programmer A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...
s notable for their contributions to software, either as original author or architect, or for later additions. All entries must already have associated articles.


A

* Michael Abrash – program optimization and x86 assembly language * Scott Adams – series of text adventures beginning in the late 1970s * Tarn Adams – Dwarf Fortress * Leonard Adleman – cocreated
RSA RSA may refer to: Organizations Academia and education * Rabbinical Seminary of America, a yeshiva in New York City *Regional Science Association International (formerly the Regional Science Association), a US-based learned society *Renaissance S ...
algorithm (being the ''A'' in that name), coined the term ''computer virus'' * Alfred Aho – cocreated AWK (being the ''A'' in that name), and main author of famous Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (Dragon book) * Andrei Alexandrescu – author, expert on languages C++, D * Paul Allen – Altair BASIC, Applesoft BASIC, cofounded Microsoft * Eric Allman – sendmail, syslog *
Marc Andreessen Marc Lowell Andreessen ( ; born July 9, 1971) is an American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon ...
– cocreated Mosaic, cofounded
Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was onc ...
* Jeremy Ashkenas – CoffeeScript programming language and Backbone.js * Bill Atkinson – QuickDraw, HyperCard


B

* Roland Carl Backhouse – computer program construction, algorithmic problem solving, ALGOL * John Backus – Fortran, BNF *
Lars Bak Lars Ytting Bak (born 16 January 1980) is a Danish former professional road bicycle racer, who rode professionally between 2002 and 2019 for the Fakta, , , , and squads. From 2022, Bak will act as team manager for UCI Women's WorldTeam . Ba ...
– virtual machine specialist * Richard Bartle –
MUD A MUD (; originally multi-user dungeon, with later variants multi-user dimension and multi-user domain) is a Multiplayer video game, multiplayer Time-keeping systems in games#Real-time, real-time virtual world, usually Text-based game, text-bas ...
, with Roy Trubshaw, created MUDs * Friedrich L. Bauer –
Stack (data structure) In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of elements, with two main operations: * Push, which adds an element to the collection, and * Pop, which removes the most recently added element that was not y ...
, ''Sequential Formula Translation'', ALGOL, software engineering, Bauer–Fike theorem * Kent Beck – created Extreme programming, cocreated JUnit * Donald Becker – Linux Ethernet drivers, Beowulf clustering * Brian Behlendorf –
Apache HTTP Server The Apache HTTP Server ( ) is a free and open-source cross-platform web server software, released under the terms of Apache License 2.0. Apache is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache So ...
* Doug Bell – '' Dungeon Master'' series of video games * Fabrice Bellard – created FFmpeg open codec library, QEMU virtualization tools *
Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profess ...
– invented World Wide Web *
Daniel J. Bernstein Daniel Julius Bernstein (sometimes known as djb; born October 29, 1971) is an American German mathematician, cryptologist, and computer scientist. He is a visiting professor at CASA at Ruhr University Bochum, as well as a research professor of ...
– djbdns, qmail * Eric Bina – cocreated Mosaic web browser * Marc Blank – cocreated '' Zork'' * Joshua Bloch – core Java language designer, lead the Java collections framework project * Jonathan Blow – video games ''
Braid A braid (also referred to as a plait) is a complex structure or pattern formed by interlacing two or more strands of flexible material such as textile yarns, wire, or hair. The simplest and most common version is a flat, solid, three-strande ...
'' and '' The Witness'' *
Susan G. Bond Susan Bond (born 1942), was a scientific officer and computer programmer for the Mathematics Division of the Royal Radar Establishment (RRE) in the United Kingdom. She worked extensively on the programming language ALGOL 68 and the Royal Radar ...
– cocreated ALGOL 68-R * Grady Booch – cocreated Unified Modeling Language *
Bert Bos Gijsbert (Bert) Bos (born 1963Gijsbert BosRapid user interface development with the script language Gist, Dissertation, Groningen University, 1993) is a computer scientist known for the development of Argo, a web browser he developed as test app ...
– authored
Argo In Greek mythology the ''Argo'' (; in Greek: ) was a ship built with the help of the gods that Jason and the Argonauts sailed from Iolcos to Colchis to retrieve the Golden Fleece. The ship has gone on to be used as a motif in a variety of sour ...
web browser, co-authored
Cascading Style Sheets Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...
*
Stephen R. Bourne Stephen Richard "Steve" Bourne (born 7 January 1944) is an English computer scientist based in the United States for most of his career. He is well known as the author of the Bourne shell (sh), which is the foundation for the standard command-li ...
– cocreated ALGOL 68C, created
Bourne shell The Bourne shell (sh) is a Shell (computing), shell Command-line interface#Command-line interpreter, command-line interpreter for computer operating systems. The Bourne shell was the default Unix shell, shell for Version 7 Unix. Unix-like syste ...
* David Bradley – coder on the
IBM PC The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a team ...
project team who wrote the ''Control-Alt-Delete'' keyboard handler, embedded in all PC-compatible
BIOS In computing, BIOS (, ; Basic Input/Output System, also known as the System BIOS, ROM BIOS, BIOS ROM or PC BIOS) is firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization during the ...
es * Andrew Braybrook – video games '' Paradroid'' and ''
Uridium ''Uridium'' (released on the NES as ''The Last Starfighter'') is a science fiction side-scrolling shoot 'em up originally designed by Andrew Braybrook for the Commodore 64, and later ported to other 8-bit machines. It consists of fifteen levels, ...
'' * Larry Breed – implementation of Iverson Notation (APL), co-developed APL\360, Scientific Time Sharing Corporation cofounder * Jack Elton Bresenham – created Bresenham's line algorithm * Dan Bricklin – cocreated VisiCalc, the first personal spreadsheet program * Walter Bright – Digital Mars, First C++ compiler, authored D (programming language) * Sergey Brin – cofounded Google Inc. * Per Brinch Hansen (surname "Brinch Hansen") – RC 4000 multiprogramming system, operating system kernels, microkernels, monitors, concurrent programming, Concurrent Pascal, distributed computing & processes,
parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different fo ...
* Richard Brodie – Microsoft Word * Andries Brouwer – '' Hack'', former maintainer of man pager,
Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...
hacker * Danielle Bunten Berry (Dani Bunten) – '' M.U.L.E.'', multiplayer video game and other noted video games * Dries Buytaert – created
Drupal Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide ...


C

*
Steve Capps Steve Capps is an American computer programmer, who was one of the designers of the original Apple Macintosh computer. Capps started working at the Xerox Corporation while still a computer science student at the Rochester Institute of Technology. ...
– cocreated Macintosh and
Newton Newton most commonly refers to: * Isaac Newton (1642–1726/1727), English scientist * Newton (unit), SI unit of force named after Isaac Newton Newton may also refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''Newton'' (film), a 2017 Indian film * Newton ( ...
*
John Carmack John D. Carmack II (born August 20, 1970) is an American computer programmer and video game developer. He co-founded the video game company id Software and was the lead programmer of its 1990s games ''Commander Keen'', ''Wolfenstein 3D'', ''Doo ...
– first-person shooters '' Doom'', '' Quake'' * Vint Cerf – TCP/IP, NCP * Ward Christensen – wrote the first BBS (Bulletin Board System) system CBBS * Edgar F. Codd – principal architect of
relational model The relational model (RM) is an approach to managing data using a Structure (mathematical logic), structure and language consistent with first-order logic, first-order predicate logic, first described in 1969 by English computer scientist Edgar F. ...
* Bram Cohen – BitTorrent protocol design and implementation * Alain Colmerauer – Prolog *
Richard W. Conway Richard Walter Conway (born December 12, 1931) is an American industrial engineer and computer scientist who is the Emerson Electric Company Professor of Manufacturing Management, Emeritus in the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell U ...
– compilers for CORC, CUPL, and PL/C; XCELL Factory Modelling System *
Alan Cooper Alan Cooper (born June 3, 1952) is an American software designer and programmer. Widely recognized as the "Father of Visual Basic", Cooper is also known for his books ''About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design'' and ''The Inmates Are R ...
– Visual Basic *
Mike Cowlishaw Mike Cowlishaw is a visiting professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick, and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He is a retired IBM Fellow, and was a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technol ...
– REXX and NetRexx, LEXX editor, image processing,
decimal The decimal numeral system (also called the base-ten positional numeral system and denary or decanary) is the standard system for denoting integer and non-integer numbers. It is the extension to non-integer numbers of the Hindu–Arabic numeral ...
arithmetic packages * Alan Cox – co-developed Linux kernel * Brad Cox – Objective-C * Mark Crispin – created IMAP, authored UW-IMAP, one of reference implementations of
IMAP4 In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by . IMAP was designed with the goal ...
* William Crowther – ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' * Ward Cunningham – created Wiki concept * Dave Cutler – architected RSX-11M,
OpenVMS OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using Ope ...
, VAXELN, DEC MICA, Windows NT


D

* Ole-Johan Dahl – cocreated
Simula Simula is the name of two simulation programming languages, Simula I and Simula 67, developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard. Syntactically, it is an approximate superset of ALGOL 6 ...
, object-oriented programming * Ryan Dahl – created Node.js * James Duncan Davidson – created Tomcat, now part of
Jakarta Project The Jakarta Project created and maintained open source software for the Java platform. It operated as an umbrella project under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation, and all Jakarta products are released under the Apache License. As ...
* Terry A. Davis – developer of TempleOS *
Jeff Dean Jeffrey Adgate "Jeff" Dean (born July 23, 1968) is an American computer scientist and software engineer. Since 2018, he is the lead of Google AI, Google's AI division. Education Dean received a B.S., ''summa cum laude'', from the University o ...
– Spanner, Bigtable, MapReduce * L. Peter Deutsch – Ghostscript, Assembler for PDP-1, XDS-940
timesharing In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1 Its emergence a ...
system, QED original co-author * Robert Dewar – IFIP WG 2.1 member, chairperson, ALGOL 68; AdaCore cofounder, president, CEO *
Edsger W. Dijkstra Edsger Wybe Dijkstra ( ; ; 11 May 1930 – 6 August 2002) was a Dutch computer scientist, programmer, software engineer, systems scientist, and science essayist. He received the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing progra ...
– contributions to ALGOL, Dijkstra's algorithm, ''
Go To Statement Considered Harmful GoTo (goto, GOTO, GO TO or other case combinations, depending on the programming language) is a statement found in many computer programming languages. It performs a one-way transfer of control to another line of code; in contrast a function ...
'', IFIP WG 2.1 member *
Matt Dillon Matthew Raymond Dillon (born February 18, 1964) is an American actor. He has received various accolades, including an Oscar and Grammy nomination. Dillon made his feature film debut in '' Over the Edge'' (1979) and established himself as a te ...
– programmed various software including DICE and DragonflyBSD * Jack Dorsey – created Twitter *
Martin Dougiamas Moodle is a free and open-source learning management system written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Moodle is used for blended learning, distance education, flipped classroom and other online learning projects i ...
– creator and lead developed Moodle *
Adam Dunkels Adam Dunkels (born 1978) is a Swedish computer scientist, computer programmer, entrepreneur, and founder of Thingsquare, an Internet of things (IoT) product development business. His father was professor of mathematics Andrejs Dunkels. His moth ...
– authored Contiki operating system, the lwIP and uIP embedded TCP/IP stacks, invented
protothread A protothread is a low-overhead mechanism for concurrent programming. Protothreads function as stackless, lightweight threads, or coroutines, providing a blocking context cheaply using minimal memory per protothread (on the order of single bytes). ...
s


E

* Les Earnest – authored finger program * Alan Edelman – Edelman's Law, stochastic operator, Interactive Supercomputing, Julia (programming language) cocreator, high performance computing, numerical computing * Brendan Eich – created JavaScript * Larry Ellison – cocreated
Oracle Database Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle DBMS, Oracle Autonomous Database, or simply as Oracle) is a multi-model database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation. It is a database commonly used for running online t ...
, cofounded
Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...
* Andrey Ershov – languages ''ALPHA'', '' Rapira''; first Soviet time-sharing system ''AIST-0'', electronic publishing system ''RUBIN'',
multiprocessing Multiprocessing is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. There ar ...
workstation ''MRAMOR'', IFIP WG 2.1 member, ''Aesthetics and the Human Factor in Programming'' * Marc Ewing – created Red Hat Linux


F

* Scott Fahlman – created smiley face emoticon :-) * Dan Farmer – created
COPS Cop or Cops commonly refers to: * Police officer Cop and other variants may also refer to: Art and entertainment Film * ''Cop'' (film), a 1988 American thriller * ''Cops'' (film), an American silent comedy short starring Buster Keaton * ''The ...
and Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN) Security Scanners *
Steve Fawkner Steve Fawkner is an Australian video game designer, programmer, and composer. He created the ''Warlords'' game series in 1989 and more recently the '' Puzzle Quest'' series. Career In 2003, after a long alliance with SSG, he split off to form h ...
– created '' Warlords'' and ''
Puzzle Quest ''Puzzle Quest'' is a series of puzzle video games where tile-matching serves as the combat for a role-playing video game. The first game was released in 2007: '' Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords'', a spin-off of the ''Warlords'' series o ...
'' *
Stuart Feldman Stuart Feldman is a computer scientist. He is best known as the creator of the computer software program ''make''. He was also an author of the first Fortran 77 compiler, was part of the original group at Bell Labs that created the Unix operat ...
– created make, authored Fortran 77 compiler, part of original group that created Unix *
David Filo David Robert Filo (born April 20, 1966) is an American billionaire businessman and the co-founder of Yahoo! with Jerry Yang. His Filo Server Program, written in the C programming language, was the server-side software used to dynamically serve ...
– cocreated Yahoo! * Brad Fitzpatrick – created memcached, Livejournal and OpenID * Andrew Fluegelman – author PC-Talk communications software; considered a cocreated
shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer ...
* Mahmoud Samir Fayed – created PWCT and Ring * Martin Fowler – created the dependency injection pattern of software engineering, a form of inversion of control * Brian Fox – created Bash, Readline, GNU Finger


G

*
Elon Gasper Elon James Gasper (born 1952) is the former Senior VP at VizX Labs and co-founder of 1980s era software company Bright Star Technology. Described by Ken Williams as "a genius ex-college professor specializing in linguistics," Gasper holds severa ...
– cofounded
Bright Star Technology Bright Star Technology, Inc. was founded by Elon Gasper and Nedra Goedert during the early 1980s and was a key player in multimedia technology. Well-known titles from Bright Star include HyperAnimation, Alphabet Blocks, and the Talking Tutors s ...
, patented realistic facial movements for in-game speech; HyperAnimator, Alphabet Blocks, etc. * Bill Gates – Altair BASIC, cofounded Microsoft * Nick Gerakines – author, contributor to open-source Erlang projects * Jim Gettys – X Window System, HTTP/1.1, One Laptop per Child, Bufferbloat * Steve Gibson – created
SpinRite SpinRite is a computer program for scanning RAS Random Access Storage devices such as hard disks, reading and rewriting data using proprietary programming methods to resolve and retrieve data that is unreadable by DOS or Windows. The first vers ...
* John Gilmore – GNU Debugger (GDB) * Adele Goldberg – cocreated
Smalltalk Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...
*
Robert Griesemer Robert Griesemer (born 1964) is a Swiss computer scientist. He is best known for his work on the Go programming language. Prior to Go, he worked on Google's V8 JavaScript engine, the Sawzall language, the Java HotSpot virtual machine, and the Str ...
– cocreated Go *
Ryan C. Gordon Ryan C. Gordon (also known as icculus) is a computer programmer and former Loki Software employee responsible for ''icculus.org'', which hosts many Loki Software projects as well as others. Gordon's site hosts projects with the code from such ...
(a.k.a. Icculus) – Lokigames, ioquake3 * James Gosling – Java, Gosling Emacs,
NeWS News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different Media (communication), media: word of mouth, printing, Mail, postal systems, broadcasting, Telecommunications, electronic communication, or through the tes ...
* Bill Gosper – Macsyma, Lisp machine, hashlife, helped Donald Knuth on Vol.2 of The Art of Computer Programming (Semi-numerical algorithms) * Paul Graham – Yahoo! Store, On Lisp, ANSI
Common Lisp Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ''ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S20018)'' (formerly ''X3.226-1994 (R1999)''). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperlinked HTML version, has been derived fro ...
* John Graham-Cumming – authored POPFile, a
Bayesian filter In probability theory, statistics, and machine learning, recursive Bayesian estimation, also known as a Bayes filter, is a general probabilistic approach for estimating an unknown probability density function (PDF) recursively over time using inco ...
-based e-mail classifier * David Gries – The book ''The Science of Programming'',
Interference freedom In computer science, interference freedom is a technique for proving partial correctness of concurrent programs with shared variables. Hoare logic had been introduced earlier to prove correctness of sequential programs. In her PhD thesis (and pape ...
, Member Emeritus, IFIP Working Group 2.3 on Programming Methodology * Ralph Griswold – cocreated SNOBOL, created Icon (programming language) * Richard Greenblatt – Lisp machine, Incompatible Timesharing System, MacHack * Neil J. Gunther – authored Pretty Damn Quick (PDQ) performance modeling program *
Scott Guthrie Scott Guthrie is Executive Vice President of the Cloud and AI group in Microsoft. He leads the teams that deliver Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, GitHub, .NET, Hololens, Microsoft SQL Server, Power BI and Pow ...
(a.k.a. ScottGu) – ASP.NET creator * Jürg Gutknecht – with Niklaus Wirth: Lilith computer;
Modula-2 Modula-2 is a structured, procedural programming language developed between 1977 and 1985/8 by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich. It was created as the language for the operating system and application software of the Lilith personal workstation. It w ...
, Oberon, Zonnon programming languages; Oberon operating system *
Andi Gutmans Andi (Andrei) Gutmans is an Israeli programmer and entrepreneur. Biography Andi Gutmans holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Technion in Haifa. Gutmans holds four citizenships: Swiss, British, Israeli and American. Business ...
– cocreated PHP programming language * Michael Guy – Phoenix, work on number theory,
computer algebra In mathematics and computer science, computer algebra, also called symbolic computation or algebraic computation, is a scientific area that refers to the study and development of algorithms and software for manipulating mathematical expressions ...
, higher dimension polyhedra theory, ALGOL 68C; work with John Horton Conway


H

* Daniel Ha – cofounder and CEO of blog comment platform
Disqus Disqus () is an American blog comment hosting service for web sites and online communities that use a networked platform. The company's platform includes various features, such as social integration, social networking, user profiles, spam and ...
*
Nico Habermann Arie Nicolaas Habermann (26 June 1932 – 8 August 1993), often known as Nico Habermann, was a noted Dutch computer scientist. Habermann was born in Groningen, Netherlands, and earned his B.S. in mathematics and physics and M.S. in mathematics f ...
– work on operating systems, software engineering,
inter-process communication In computer science, inter-process communication or interprocess communication (IPC) refers specifically to the mechanisms an operating system provides to allow the processes to manage shared data. Typically, applications can use IPC, categori ...
, process synchronization, deadlock avoidance,
software verification Software verification is a discipline of software engineering whose goal is to assure that software fully satisfies all the expected requirements. Broad scope and classification A broad definition of verification makes it equivalent to software t ...
, programming languages:
ALGOL 60 ALGOL 60 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1960'') is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It followed on from ALGOL 58 which had introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them, representing a k ...
, BLISS,
Pascal Pascal, Pascal's or PASCAL may refer to: People and fictional characters * Pascal (given name), including a list of people with the name * Pascal (surname), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name ** Blaise Pascal, Fren ...
, Ada * Jim Hall – started the FreeDOS project *
Margaret Hamilton Margaret Hamilton may refer to: * Margaret Hamilton (nurse) (1840–1922), American nurse in the Civil War * Maggie Hamilton (1867–1952), Scottish artist * Margaret Hamilton (educator) (1871–1969), American educator * Margaret Hamilton (actre ...
– Director of Software Engineering Division of MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the space Apollo program *
Eric Hehner The given name Eric, Erich, Erikk, Erik, Erick, or Eirik is derived from the Old Norse name ''Eiríkr'' (or ''Eríkr'' in Old East Norse due to monophthongization). The first element, ''ei-'' may be derived from the older Proto-Norse ''* ain ...
– predicative programming, formal methods, quote notation, ALGOL * David Heinemeier Hansson – created the Ruby on Rails framework for developing web applications *
Rebecca Heineman Rebecca Ann Heineman is an American video game designer and programmer. Heineman was a founding member of video game companies Interplay Productions, Logicware, Contraband Entertainment, and Olde Sküül. She has been chief executive officer ...
– authored ''
Bard's Tale III ''The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate'' is a computer fantasy role-playing video game created by Interplay Productions in 1988. It is the second sequel to ''The Bard's Tale''. It was designed by Rebecca Heineman, Bruce Schlickbernd, and Michael ...
: Thief of Fate'' and ''
Dragon Wars ''Dragon Wars'' is a fantasy role-playing video game developed by Rebecca Heineman and published by Interplay Productions in 1989 and distributed by Activision. Gameplay The player starts the game with a party of four characters, who can be eith ...
'' * Gernot Heiser – operating system teaching, research, commercialising,
Open Kernel Labs Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs) is a privately owned company that develops microkernel-based hypervisors and operating systems for embedded systems. The company was founded in 2006 by Steve Subar and Gernot Heiser as a spinout from NICTA. It was ...
, OKL4, Wombat * Anders Hejlsberg – Turbo Pascal, Borland Delphi, C#, TypeScript *
Ted Henter Ted Henter (born 1950 in Panama Canal Zone) is an American computer programmer and businessperson known for having invented the JAWS screen reader for the blind.Freedom Scientific) created JAWS screen reader software for blind people * Andy Hertzfeld – cocreated Macintosh, cofounded General Magic, cofounded Eazel *
D. Richard Hipp Dwayne Richard Hipp (born April 9, 1961) is an American software developer and the primary author of SQLite as well as the Fossil (software), Fossil SCM. He also authored the Lemon (parser generator), Lemon parser generator, and CVSTrac; the latt ...
– created SQLite *
C. A. R. Hoare Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (Tony Hoare or C. A. R. Hoare) (born 11 January 1934) is a British computer scientist who has made foundational contributions to programming languages, algorithms, operating systems, formal verification, and c ...
– first implementation of quicksort,
ALGOL 60 ALGOL 60 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1960'') is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It followed on from ALGOL 58 which had introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them, representing a k ...
compiler, Communicating sequential processes *
Louis Hodes Louis Hodes (June 19, 1934 – June 30, 2008) was an American mathematician, computer scientist, and cancer researcher. Early life and computer science work Louis Hodes got his Bachelor of Science (B.S.) from the Polytechnic Institute of ...
–
Lisp A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lisping ...
, pattern recognition, logic programming, cancer research * Grace Hopper –
Harvard Mark I The Harvard Mark I, or IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), was a general-purpose electromechanical computer used in the war effort during the last part of World War II. One of the first programs to run on the Mark I was initi ...
computer, FLOW-MATIC,
COBOL COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily us ...
* David A. Huffman – created the Huffman coding; a compression algorithm *
Roger Hui Roger Kwok Wah Hui (December 29 1953 – October 16, 2021) was a computer scientist who worked on array programming languages. He codeveloped the programming language J. Education and career Hui was born in Hong Kong in 1953. In 1966, he im ...
– created J * Dave Hyatt – co-authored Mozilla Firefox *
P. J. Hyett P. J. Hyett (born August 10, 1983) is an American software developer and technology entrepreneur, and a co-founder of GitHub, an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git, which he created with Tom Preston-Wer ...
– cofounded GitHub


I

* Miguel de Icaza –
GNOME A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...
project leader, initiated Mono project * Roberto Ierusalimschy –
Lua Lua or LUA may refer to: Science and technology * Lua (programming language) * Latvia University of Agriculture * Last universal ancestor, in evolution Ethnicity and language * Lua people, of Laos * Lawa people, of Thailand sometimes referred t ...
leading architect * Dan Ingalls – cocreated
Smalltalk Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...
and Bitblt * Geir Ivarsøy – cocreated Opera web browser * Ken Iverson – APL, J * Toru Iwatani – created ''
Pac-Man originally called ''Puck Man'' in Japan, is a 1980 maze action video game developed and released by Namco for arcades. In North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturing as part of its licensing agreement with Namco America. Th ...
''


J

*
Bo Jangeborg Bo Jangeborg is a Sweden, Swedish computer programmer. He made several programs for the ZX Spectrum, the best known being the game ''Fairlight (video game), Fairlight'' (1985), its sequel ''Fairlight II (video game), Fairlight II'' (1986), and the ...
– ZX Spectrum games * Paul Jardetzky – authored server program for the first webcam *
Stephen C. Johnson Stephen Curtis Johnson (b. 1944; known as Steve Johnson) is a computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs and Old AT&T, AT&T for nearly 20 years. He is best known for Yacc, Lint (software), Lint, spell (Unix), spell, and the Portable C Compiler, w ...
– yacc * Lynne Jolitz –
386BSD 386BSD (also known as "Jolix") is a discontinued Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was released in 1992 and ran on PC-compatible computer systems based on the 32-bit Intel 80386 microprocessor. 386BSD inn ...
* William Jolitz –
386BSD 386BSD (also known as "Jolix") is a discontinued Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was released in 1992 and ran on PC-compatible computer systems based on the 32-bit Intel 80386 microprocessor. 386BSD inn ...
* Bill Joy – BSD, csh, vi, cofounded
Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...
* Robert K. Jung – created ARJ


K

* Poul-Henning Kamp – MD5 password hash algorithm, FreeBSD GEOM and GBDE, part of UFS2, FreeBSD Jails, malloc and the Beerware license *
Mitch Kapor Mitchell David Kapor ( ; born November 1, 1950) is an American entrepreneur best known for his work as an application developer in the early days of the personal computer software industry, later founding Lotus, where he was instrumental in deve ...
– Lotus 1-2-3, founded
Lotus Development Corporation Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was "offloaded" to India's HCL Technologies in 2018. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2- ...
* Phil Katz – created Zip (file format), authored PKZIP *
Ted Kaehler Ted Kaehler (born 1950) is an American computer scientist known for his role in the development of several system methods. He is most noted for his contributions to the programming languages Smalltalk, Squeak, and Apple Computer's HyperCard sy ...
– contributions to
Smalltalk Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...
, Squeak, HyperCard * Alan Kay –
Smalltalk Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...
, Dynabook, Object-oriented programming, Squeak *
Mel Kaye The Story of Mel is an archetypical piece of computer programming folklore. Its subject, Melvin Kaye, is an exemplary "Real Programmer" whose subtle techniques fascinate his colleagues. Story Ed Nather's ''The Story of Mel'' details the extraord ...
– LGP-30 and RPC-4000 machine code programmer at Royal McBee in the 1950s, famed as "
Real Programmer Real may refer to: Currencies * Brazilian real (R$) * Central American Republic real * Mexican real * Portuguese real * Spanish real * Spanish colonial real Music Albums * ''Real'' (L'Arc-en-Ciel album) (2000) * ''Real'' (Bright album) (2010) ...
" in the Story of Mel *
Stan Kelly-Bootle Stanley Bootle, known as Stan Kelly-Bootle (15 September 1929 – 16 April 2014), was a British author, academic, singer-songwriter and computer scientist. He took his stage name Stan Kelly (he was not known as Stan Kelly-Bootle in folk music circ ...
– Manchester Mark 1, '' The Devil's DP Dictionary'' * John Kemeny – cocreated
BASIC BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use. The original version was created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College ...
* Brian Kernighan – cocreated AWK (being the ''K'' in that name), authored ditroff text-formatting tool * Gary Kildall –
CP/M CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initial ...
, MP/M,
BIOS In computing, BIOS (, ; Basic Input/Output System, also known as the System BIOS, ROM BIOS, BIOS ROM or PC BIOS) is firmware used to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs and to perform hardware initialization during the ...
, PL/M, also known for work on data-flow analysis,
binary recompiler A binary recompiler is a compiler that takes executable binary files as input, analyzes their structure, applies transformations and optimizations, and outputs new optimized executable binaries. The foundation to the concepts of binary recompilat ...
s, multitasking operating systems, graphical user interfaces, disk caching,
CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both comput ...
file system and data structures, early multi-media technologies, founded Digital Research (DRI) * Tom Knight – Incompatible Timesharing System * Jim Knopf – a.k.a. Jim Button, author PC-File flatfile database; cocreated
shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer ...
* Donald E. Knuth – TeX, CWEB, Metafont, '' The Art of Computer Programming'', Concrete Mathematics * Andrew R. Koenig – co-authored books on C and C++ and former Project Editor of ISO/ANSI standards committee for C++ *
Cornelis H. A. Koster Cornelis Hermanus Antonius "Kees" Koster (13 July 1943 – 21 March 2013) was a Dutch computer scientist who was a professor in the Department of Informatics at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Born in Haarlem, his family move ...
– ''Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 68'', ALGOL 68 transput


L

* Andre LaMothe – created XGameStation, one of world's first video game console development kits * Leslie Lamport – LaTeX * Butler Lampson – QED original co-author * Peter Landin – ISWIM,
J operator In computer science, Peter Landin's J operator is a programming construct that post-composes a lambda expression with the continuation to the current lambda-context. The resulting “function” is first-class and can be passed on to subseque ...
, SECD machine, off-side rule, syntactic sugar, ALGOL, IFIP WG 2.1 member * Tom Lane – main author of libjpeg, major developer of
PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...
* Sam Lantinga – created Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) * Dick Lathwell – codeveloped APL\360 * Chris Lattner – main author of LLVM project *
Samuel J. Leffler Samuel J Leffler is a computer scientist, known for his extensive work on BSD, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. Among other projects, he created HylaFAX, FlexFAX, LibTIFF, and the Comparison of open source wireless drivers#FreeBSD, ...
– BSD, FlexFAX, LibTIFF, FreeBSD Wireless Device Drivers * Rasmus Lerdorf – original created PHP * Michael Lesk – Lex * Gordon Letwin – architected OS/2, authored High Performance File System (HPFS) * Jochen Liedtke – microkernel operating systems Eumel, L3, L4 * Charles H. Lindsey – IFIP WG 2.1 member, ''Revised Report on ALGOL 68'' * Håkon Wium Lie – co-authored
Cascading Style Sheets Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...
*
Yanhong Annie Liu Yanhong Annie Liu (born May 20, 1965) is a computer scientist and professor of computer science at Stony Brook University where she works on new programming languages, software systems, algorithms, program design, optimizing, analysis, and transfo ...
– programming languages, algorithms, program design, program optimization, software systems, optimizing, analysis, and transformations, intelligent systems, distributed computing, computer security, IFIP WG 2.1 member * Robert Love –
Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...
developer *
Ada Lovelace Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (''née'' Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the A ...
– first programmer (of
Charles Babbage Charles Babbage (; 26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer. Babbage is considered ...
s'
Analytical Engine The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, which was a des ...
) * Al Lowe – created '' Leisure Suit Larry'' series *
David Luckham David Luckham is an emeritus professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he was one of the implementers of the first systems for the programming language L ...
–
Lisp A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lisping ...
, Automated theorem proving, Stanford
Pascal Pascal, Pascal's or PASCAL may refer to: People and fictional characters * Pascal (given name), including a list of people with the name * Pascal (surname), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name ** Blaise Pascal, Fren ...
Verifier, Complex event processing, Rational Software cofounder ( Ada compiler) * Hans Peter Luhn – hash-coding, linked list, searching and sorting binary tree


M

*
Khaled Mardam-Bey mIRC is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client for Windows, created in 1995. It is a fully functional chat utility and its integrated scripting language makes it extensible and versatile. mIRC has been described as "one of the most popular IRC cl ...
– created mIRC (Internet Relay Chat Client) * Robert C. Martin – authored ''Clean Code'', ''The Clean Coder'', leader of Clean Code movement, signatory on the Agile Manifesto * John Mashey – authored PWB shell, also called Mashey shell * Yukihiro Matsumoto – Ruby * John McCarthy –
Lisp A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lisping ...
, ALGOL, IFIP WG 2.1 member, artificial intelligence *
Craig McClanahan Craig R. McClanahan is a programmer and original author of the Apache Struts framework for building web applications. He was part of the expert group that defined the servlet 2.2, 2.3 and JSP 1.1, 1.2 specifications. He is also the architect of ...
– original author Jakarta Struts, architect of Tomcat Catalina servlet container *
Daniel D. McCracken Daniel D. McCracken (July 23, 1930 – July 30, 2011) was a computer scientist in the United States. He was a professor of Computer Sciences at the City College of New York, and the author of over two dozen textbooks on computer programming, wi ...
– professor at
City College City college may refer to: In the United States * Community college, a type of educational institution sometimes called a ''junior college'' or a ''city college'' in the United States * City College of New York ** 137th Street – City College (IR ...
and authored ''Guide to Algol Programming'', ''Guide to
Cobol COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily us ...
Programming'', ''Guide to Fortran Programming'' (1957) * Scott A. McGregor – architect and development team lead of Microsoft Windows 1.0, co-authored X Window System version 11, and developed Cedar Viewers Windows System at Xerox PARC * Douglas McIlroy – macros, pipes and filters, concept of software componentry, Unix tools (spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, tr, etc.) *
Marshall Kirk McKusick Marshall Kirk McKusick (born January 19, 1954) is a computer scientist, known for his extensive work on BSD UNIX, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. He was president of the USENIX Association from 1990 to 1992 and again from 2002 to ...
–
Berkeley Software Distribution The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...
(BSD), work on FFS, implemented soft updates * Sid Meier – author, '' Civilization'' and '' Railroad Tycoon'', cofounded
MicroProse MicroProse is an American video game publisher and video game developer, developer founded by Bill Stealey, Sid Meier, and Andy Hollis in 1982. It developed and published numerous games, including starting the ''Civilization (series), Civilizatio ...
* Bertrand Meyer – Eiffel, '' Object-oriented Software Construction'', design by contract * Bob Miner – cocreated
Oracle Database Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle DBMS, Oracle Autonomous Database, or simply as Oracle) is a multi-model database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation. It is a database commonly used for running online t ...
, cofounded
Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...
* Jeff Minter – psychedelic, and often llama-related video games *
James G. Mitchell James George "Jim" Mitchell is a Canadian computer scientist. He has worked on programming language design and implementation ( FORTRAN WATFOR, Mesa, Euclid, C++, Java), interactive programming systems, dynamic interpreting and compiling, docume ...
– WATFOR compiler, Mesa (programming language), Spring (operating system),
ARM architecture ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures for computer processors, configured ...
* Arvind Mithal – formal verification of large
digital system Digital electronics is a field of electronics involving the study of digital signals and the engineering of devices that use or produce them. This is in contrast to analog electronics and analog signals. Digital electronic circuits are usually ...
s, developing dynamic dataflow architectures,
parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different fo ...
programming languages (Id, pH), compiling on parallel machines *
Petr Mitrichev Petr Mitrichev (born 19 March 1985) is a Russian competitive programmer who has won multiple major international competitions. His accomplishments include gold (2000, 2002) and silver (2001) medals in the IOI, gold medals (2003, 2005) in the ACM ...
– competitive programmer * Cleve Moler – co-authored LINPACK, EISPACK, and MATLAB * Lou Montulli – created
Lynx A lynx is a type of wild cat. Lynx may also refer to: Astronomy * Lynx (constellation) * Lynx (Chinese astronomy) * Lynx X-ray Observatory, a NASA-funded mission concept for a next-generation X-ray space observatory Places Canada * Lynx, Ontar ...
browser, cookies, the blink tag, server push and client pull, HTTP proxying, HTTP over SSL, browser integration with animated GIFs, founding member of HTML working group at W3C *
Bram Moolenaar Bram Moolenaar (born 1961, Lisse) is a Dutch computer programmer and an active member of the open-source software community. He is the original author, maintainer, release manager, and benevolent dictator for life of Vim, a vi-derivative tex ...
– authored text-editor
Vim Vim means enthusiasm and vigor. It may also refer to: * Vim (cleaning product) * Vim Comedy Company, a movie studio * Vim Records * Vimentin, a protein * "Vim", a song by Machine Head on the album ''Through the Ashes of Empires'' * Vim (text ed ...
*
David A. Moon David A. Moon is a programmer and computer scientist, known for his work on the Lisp programming language, as co-author of the Emacs text editor, as the inventor of ephemeral garbage collection, and as one of the designers of the Dylan program ...
– Maclisp, ZetaLisp * Charles H. Moore – created Forth language *
Roger Moore Sir Roger George Moore (14 October 192723 May 2017) was an English actor. He was the third actor to portray fictional British secret agent James Bond in the Eon Productions film series, playing the character in seven feature films between 19 ...
– co-developed APL\360, created IPSANET, cofounded
I. P. Sharp Associates I. P. Sharp Associates (IPSA) was a major Canadian computer time-sharing, consulting and services firm of the 1970s and 1980s. IPSA is well known for its work on the programming language APL, an early packet switching computer network named IPSA ...
* Matt Mullenweg – authored WordPress * Boyd Munro – Australian developed
GRASP A grasp is an act of taking, holding or seizing firmly with (or as if with) the hand. An example of a grasp is the handshake, wherein two people grasp one of each other's like hands. In zoology particularly, prehensility is the quality of an appe ...
, owns SDI, one of earliest software development companies * Mike Muuss – authored ping, network tool to detect hosts


N

* Patrick Naughton – early Java designer, HotJava * Peter Naur (1928–2016) –
Backus–Naur form In computer science, Backus–Naur form () or Backus normal form (BNF) is a metasyntax notation for context-free grammars, often used to describe the syntax of languages used in computing, such as computer programming languages, document formats ...
(BNF),
ALGOL 60 ALGOL 60 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1960'') is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It followed on from ALGOL 58 which had introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them, representing a k ...
, IFIP WG 2.1 member * Fredrik Neij – cocreated The Pirate Bay * Graham Nelson – created Inform authoring system for
interactive fiction '' Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the ...
* Greg Nelson (1953–2015) – satisfiability modulo theories,
extended static checking Extended static checking (ESC) is a collective name in computer science for a range of techniques for statically checking the correctness of various program constraints. ESC can be thought of as an extended form of type checking. As with type check ...
, program verification, Modula-3 committee, ''Simplify'' theorem prover in ESC/Java *
Klára Dán von Neumann Klára Dán von Neumann (born Klára Dán; 18 August 1911 – 10 November 1963) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, self-taught engineer and computer scientist, noted as one of the first computer programmers. She was the first woman to ex ...
(1911–1963) – principal programmer for the MANIAC I *
Maurice Nivat Maurice Paul Nivat (21 December 1937 – 21 September 2017) was a French computer scientist. His research in computer science spanned the areas of formal languages, programming language semantics, and discrete geometry. A 2006 citation for an h ...
(1937–2017) – theoretical computer science, '' Theoretical Computer Science'' journal, ALGOL, IFIP WG 2.1 member *
Phiwa Nkambule Phiwa Nkambule (born 24 January 1992) is a technology entrepreneur, technology businessperson and internet activist best known for co-founding Riovic and leading it as its CEO. He previously founded Cybatar and sat on the board of the Royal Sc ...
– cofounded Riovic, founded
Cybatar Cybatar is a technology company of the full cycle specialized in cloud-based technology platforms and software. The company was founded by Phiwa Nkambule in October 2014 initially as a social networking company but pivoted into a SaaS platform ...
* Peter Norton – programmed Norton Utilities * Kristen Nygaard (1926–2002) –
Simula Simula is the name of two simulation programming languages, Simula I and Simula 67, developed in the 1960s at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard. Syntactically, it is an approximate superset of ALGOL 6 ...
, object-oriented programming


O

* Ed Oates – cocreated
Oracle Database Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle DBMS, Oracle Autonomous Database, or simply as Oracle) is a multi-model database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation. It is a database commonly used for running online t ...
, cofounded
Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...
* Martin Odersky – Scala * Peter O'Hearn – separation logic,
bunched logic Bunched logic is a variety of substructural logic proposed by Peter O'Hearn and David Pym. Bunched logic provides primitives for reasoning about ''resource composition'', which aid in the compositional analysis of computer and other systems. It ha ...
, Infer Static Analyzer * Jarkko Oikarinen – created Internet Relay Chat (IRC) * Andrew and Philip Oliver, the Oliver Twins – many ZX Spectrum games including ''
Dizzy Dizziness is an imprecise term that can refer to a sense of disorientation in space, vertigo, or lightheadedness. It can also refer to disequilibrium or a non-specific feeling, such as giddiness or foolishness. Dizziness is a common medica ...
'' * John Ousterhout – created Tcl/ Tk


P

* Keith Packard – X Window System * Larry Page – cofounded Google, Inc. * Alexey Pajitnov – created game Tetris on Electronica 60 * Seymour Papert – Logo (programming language) * David Park (1935–1990) – first
Lisp A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lisping ...
implementation, expert in fairness, program schemas, bisimulation in concurrent computing *Mike Paterson – algorithms, analysis of algorithms (complexity) *Tim Paterson – authored 86-DOS (QDOS) *Markus Persson – created Minecraft *Jeffrey Peterson – key free and open-source software architect, created Quepasa *Charles Petzold – authored many Microsoft Windows programming books *Rob Pike – wrote first bitmapped window system for Unix, cocreated UTF-8 character encoding, authored text editor sam (program), sam and programming environment Acme (text editor), acme, main author of Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Plan 9 and Inferno (operating system), Inferno operating systems, and co-authored Go (programming language), Go programming language *Kent Pitman – technical contributor to the ANSI
Common Lisp Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ''ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S20018)'' (formerly ''X3.226-1994 (R1999)''). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperlinked HTML version, has been derived fro ...
standard *Tom Preston-Werner – cofounded GitHub


Q


R

*Theo de Raadt – founding member of NetBSD, founded OpenBSD and OpenSSH *Brian Randell –
ALGOL 60 ALGOL 60 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1960'') is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It followed on from ALGOL 58 which had introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them, representing a k ...
, software fault tolerance, dependability, pre-1950 history of computing hardware *Jef Raskin – started the Macintosh project in Apple Computer, designed Canon Cat computer, developed Archy (software), Archy (The Humane Environment) program *Eric S. Raymond – Open Source movement, authored fetchmail *Hans Reiser – created ReiserFS file system *John Resig – creator and lead developed jQuery JavaScript library *Craig Reynolds (computer graphics), Craig Reynolds – created boids computer graphics simulation *John C. Reynolds – continuations, definitional interpreters, defunctionalization, Forsythe, Gedanken language, intersection types, System F, polymorphic lambda calculus, relational parametricity, separation logic, ALGOL *Reinder van de Riet – Editor: ''Europe of Data and Knowledge Engineering'', COLOR-X event modeling language *Dennis Ritchie – C, Unix, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Inferno (operating system), Inferno *Ron Rivest – cocreated RSA (algorithm), RSA algorithm (being the ''R'' in that name). created RC4 and MD5 *John Romero – first-person shooters '' Doom'', '' Quake'' *Blake Ross – co-authored Mozilla Firefox *Douglas T. Ross – Automatically Programmed Tools (APT (programming language), APT), Computer-aided design, structured analysis and design technique, ALGOL X *Guido van Rossum – Python (programming language), Python *Philip Rubin – articulatory synthesis (ASY), sinewave synthesis (SWS), and HADES (software), HADES signal processing system. *Jeff Rulifson – lead programmer on the NLS (computer system), NLS project *Rusty Russell – created iptables for linux *Steve Russell (computer scientist), Steve Russell – first
Lisp A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lisping ...
interpreter; original ''Spacewar!'' graphic video game *Mark Russinovich – Sysinternals.com, Filemon, Regmon, Process Explorer, TCPView and RootkitRevealer


S

*Bob Sabiston – Rotoshop, interpolating rotoscope animation software *Muni Sakya – Nepalese software *Carl Sassenrath – Amiga, REBOL *Chris Sawyer – developed ''RollerCoaster Tycoon (video game), RollerCoaster Tycoon'' and the Transport Tycoon series *Cher Scarlett – Apple Inc., Apple, Webflow, Blizzard Entertainment, World Wide Technology, and USA Today *Bob Scheifler – X Window System, Jini *Isai Scheinberg – IBM engineer, founded PokerStars *Bill Schelter – GNU Maxima, GNU Common Lisp *John M. Scholes, John Scholes – Direct functions *Randal L. Schwartz – Just another Perl hacker *Adi Shamir – cocreated RSA (algorithm), RSA algorithm (being the ''S'' in that name) *Mike Shaver – founding member of Mozilla Organization *Cliff Shaw – Information Processing Language (IPL), the first AI language *Zed Shaw – wrote the Mongrel (web server), Mongrel Web Server, for Ruby web applications *Emily Short – prolific writer of Interactive fiction and co-developed Inform version 7 *Jacek Sieka – developed DC++ an open-source software, open-source, peer-to-peer file sharing, file-sharing client (computing), client *Daniel Siewiorek – electronic design automation, Reliability (computer networking), reliability computing, Context awareness, context aware mobile computing, Wearable computer, wearable computing, computer-aided design, rapid prototyping, fault tolerance *Ken Silverman – created ''Duke Nukem 3D''{{'s graphics engine *Charles Simonyi – Hungarian notation, Bravo (software), Bravo (the first WYSIWYG text editor), Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Word *Colin Simpson (author), Colin Simpson – developed CircuitLogix simulation software *Rich Skrenta – cofounded DMOZ *David Canfield Smith – invented Icon (computing), interface icons, programming by demonstration, developed graphical user interface, Xerox Star; Xerox PARC researcher, cofounded Dest Systems, Cognition *Matthew Smith (games programmer), Matthew Smith – ZX Spectrum games, including ''Manic Miner'' and ''Jet Set Willy'' *Henry Spencer – C News, Regex *Joel Spolsky – cofounded Fog Creek Software and Stack Overflow *Quentin Stafford-Fraser – authored original Virtual Network Computing, VNC viewer, first Windows VNC server, client program for the first webcam *Richard Stallman – Emacs, GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), GDB, founder and pioneer of GNU Project, terminal-independent I/O pioneer on Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), Lisp machine manual *Guy L. Steele Jr. –
Common Lisp Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ''ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S20018)'' (formerly ''X3.226-1994 (R1999)''). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperlinked HTML version, has been derived fro ...
, Scheme (programming language), Scheme, Java *Alexander Stepanov – created Standard Template Library *Christopher Strachey – draughts playing program *Ludvig Strigeus – created uTorrent, OpenTTD, ScummVM and the technology behind Spotify *Bjarne Stroustrup – created C++ *Zeev Suraski – cocreated PHP language *Gerald Jay Sussman – Scheme (programming language), Scheme *Herb Sutter – chair of ISO C++ standards committee and C++ expert *Gottfrid Svartholm – cocreated The Pirate Bay *Aaron Swartz – software developer, writer, Internet activist *Tim Sweeney (game developer), Tim Sweeney – Unreal (1998 video game), The Unreal engine, UnrealScript, ZZT


T

*Amir Taaki – leading developer for Bitcoin project *Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Andrew Tanenbaum – Minix *Audrey Tang, Audrey "Autrijus" Tang – designed Pugs (programming), Pugs *Simon Tatham – Netwide Assembler (NASM), PuTTY *Larry Tesler – the
Smalltalk Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...
code browser, debugger and object inspector, and (with Tim Mott) the Gypsy (software), Gypsy word processor *Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner – cocreated Opera web browser *Avie Tevanian – authored Mach (kernel), Mach kernel *Ken Thompson – mainly designed and authored Unix, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Plan 9 and Inferno (operating system), Inferno operating systems, B (programming language), B and Bon languages (precursors of C), created UTF-8 character encoding, introduced regular expressions in QED and co-authored Go (programming language), Go language *Michael Tiemann – G++, GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) *Linus Torvalds – original author and current maintainer of Linux kernel and created Git, a source code management system *Andrew Tridgell – Samba (software), Samba, Rsync * Roy Trubshaw –
MUD A MUD (; originally multi-user dungeon, with later variants multi-user dimension and multi-user domain) is a Multiplayer video game, multiplayer Time-keeping systems in games#Real-time, real-time virtual world, usually Text-based game, text-bas ...
– together with Richard Bartle, created MUDs *Bob Truel – cofounded DMOZ *Alan Turing – mathematician, computer scientist and Cryptanalysis, cryptanalyst *David Turner (computer scientist), David Turner – SASL (programming language), SASL, Kent Recursive Calculator, Miranda (programming language), Miranda, IFIP WG 2.1 member


V

*Wietse Venema – Postfix (software), Postfix, Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN), TCP Wrapper *Pat Villani – original author FreeDOS/DOS-C kernel, maintainer of a defunct ''Linux for Windows 9x'' distribution *Paul Vixie – BIND, Cron *Patrick Volkerding – original author and current maintainer of Slackware Linux Distribution


W

*Eiiti Wada – ALGOL N, IFIP WG 2.1 member, Japanese Industrial Standards (JIS) X 0208, 0212, Happy Hacking Keyboard *John Walker (programmer), John Walker – cofounded Autodesk *Larry Wall – Warp (1980s space-war game), rn (newsreader), rn, patch (Unix), patch, Perl *Bob Wallace (computer scientist), Bob Wallace – author PC-Write word processor; considered
shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer ...
cocreator *Chris Wanstrath – cofounded GitHub *John Warnock – created PostScript *Robert Watson (computer scientist), Robert Watson – FreeBSD network stack parallelism, TrustedBSD project and OpenBSM *Joseph Henry Wegstein – ALGOL 58,
ALGOL 60 ALGOL 60 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1960'') is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It followed on from ALGOL 58 which had introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them, representing a k ...
, IFIP WG 2.1 member, data processing technical standards, fingerprint analysis *Pei-Yuan Wei – authored ViolaWWW, one of earliest graphical browsers *Peter J. Weinberger – cocreated AWK (being the ''W'' in that name) *Jim Weirich – created Rake, Builder, and RubyGems for Ruby; popular teacher and conference speaker *Joseph Weizenbaum – created ELIZA *David Wheeler (computer scientist), David Wheeler – cocreated subroutine; designed WAKE (cipher), WAKE; co-designed Tiny Encryption Algorithm, XTEA, Burrows–Wheeler transform *Molly White (writer), Molly White – HubSpot; creator of ''Web3 Is Going Just Great'' *Arthur Whitney (computer scientist), Arthur Whitney – A+ (programming language), A+, K (programming language), K *why the lucky stiff – created libraries and writing for Ruby, including quirky, popular ''Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby'' to teach programming *Adriaan van Wijngaarden – Dutch pioneer; ARRA, ALGOL, IFIP WG 2.1 member *Bruce Wilcox – created Computer Go, programmed NEMESIS Go Master *Evan Williams (Internet entrepreneur), Evan Williams – created and cofounded language Logo (programming language), Logo *Roberta Williams, Roberta and Ken Williams (game developer), Ken Williams – Sierra Entertainment, ''King's Quest'', graphic adventure game *Sophie Wilson – designed instruction set for ARM architecture family, Acorn RISC Machine, authored BBC BASIC *Dave Winer – developed XML-RPC, Frontier scripting language * Niklaus Wirth – ALGOL W, IFIP WG 2.1 member,
Pascal Pascal, Pascal's or PASCAL may refer to: People and fictional characters * Pascal (given name), including a list of people with the name * Pascal (surname), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name ** Blaise Pascal, Fren ...
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Modula-2 Modula-2 is a structured, procedural programming language developed between 1977 and 1985/8 by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich. It was created as the language for the operating system and application software of the Lilith personal workstation. It w ...
, Oberon *Stephen Wolfram – created Mathematica *Don Woods (programmer), Don Woods – INTERCAL, Colossal Cave Adventure *Philip Woodward – ambiguity function, sinc function, Dirac comb, comb operator, rep operator, ALGOL 68-R *Steve Wozniak – ''Breakout (video game), Breakout'', Apple Integer BASIC, cofounded Apple Inc. *Will Wright (game designer), Will Wright – created the Sim City series, cofounded Maxis *William Wulf – BLISS system programming language + optimizing compiler, Hydra (operating system), Hydra operating system, Tartan Laboratories


Y

*Jerry Yang – cocreated Yahoo! *Victor Yngve – authored first string processing language, COMIT *Nobuo Yoneda – Yoneda lemma, Yoneda product, ALGOL, IFIP WG 2.1 member


Z

*Matei Zaharia – created Apache Spark *Jamie Zawinski – XEmacs, Lucid Emacs, Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, XScreenSaver *Phil Zimmermann – created encryption software Pretty Good Privacy, PGP, the ZRTP protocol, and Zfone *Mark Zuckerberg – created Facebook


See also

*List of computer scientists *List of computing people *List of important publications in computer science *List of members of the National Academy of Sciences (computer and information sciences) *List of pioneers in computer science *List of programming language researchers *List of Russian programmers *List of video game industry people#Programming, List of video game industry people (programming) Computer programmers, ! Lists of computer scientists, Programmers Lists of people by occupation, Computer Programmers