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. All entries must already have associated articles.

A

• Michael Abrash – program optimization and x86 assembly language
• Scott Adams – one of earliest developers of CP/M and DOS games
• Leonard Adleman – co-created RSA algorithm (being the A in that name), coined the term computer virus
• Alfred Aho – co-created AWK (being the A in that name), and main author of famous Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (Dragon book)
• Andrei Alexandrescu – author, expert C++, D languages
• Paul Allen – Altair BASIC, Applesoft BASIC, co-founded Microsoft
• Eric Allman – sendmail, syslog
• Marc Andreessen – co-created Mosaic, co-founded Netscape
• Jeremy Ashkenas – created 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 – virtual machine specialist
• Richard Bartle – MUD, with Roy Trubshaw, created MUDs
• Friedrich L. Bauer – Stack (data structure), Sequential Formula Translation, ALGOL, software engineering, Bauer–Fike theorem
• Kent Beck – created Extreme programming, co-created JUnit
• Donald Becker – Linux Ethernet drivers, Beowulf clustering
• Brian Behlendorf – Apache HTTP Server
• Doug Bell – Dungeon Master series of video games
• Fabrice Bellard – created FFmpeg open codec library, QEMU virtualization tools
• Tim Berners-Lee – invented World Wide Web
• Daniel J. Bernstein – djbdns, qmail
• Eric Bina – co-created Mosaic web browser
• Marc Blank – co-created Zork
• Joshua Bloch – core Java language designer, lead the Java collections framework project
• Jonathan Blow – video game designer and programmed Braid and The Witness
• Susan G. Bond – co-created ALGOL 68-R
• Grady Booch – co-created Unified Modeling Language
• Bert Bos – authored Argo web browser, co-authored Cascading Style Sheets
• Stephen R. Bourne – co-created ALGOL 68C, created Bourne shell
• David Bradley – coder on the IBM PC project team who wrote the Control-Alt-Delete keyboard handler, embedded in all PC-compatible BIOSes
• Andrew Braybrook – video games Paradroid and Uridium
• 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 – co-created VisiCalc, the first personal spreadsheet program
• Walter Bright – Digital Mars, First C++ compiler, authored D (programming language)
• Sergey Brin – co-founded Google Inc.
• Richard Brodie – Microsoft Word
• Andries Brouwer – Hack, former maintainer of man pager, Linux kernel hacker
• Danielle Bunten Berry (Dani Bunten) – M.U.L.E., multiplayer video game and other noted video games
• Dries Buytaert – created Drupal

C

• Steve Capps – co-created Macintosh and Newton
• John Carmack – 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
• Bram Cohen – BitTorrent protocol design and implementation
• Alain Colmerauer – Prolog
• Alan Cooper – Visual Basic
• Mike Cowlishaw – REXX and NetRexx, LEXX editor, image processing, decimal 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
• William Crowther – Colossal Cave Adventure
• Ward Cunningham – created Wiki concept
• Dave Cutler – architected VMS, Windows NT

D

• Ole-Johan Dahl – co-created Simula, object-oriented programming
• Ryan Dahl – created Node.js
• James Duncan Davidson – created Tomcat, now part of Jakarta Project
• Terry A. Davis – developer of TempleOS
• Jeff Dean – Spanner, Bigtable, MapReduce
• L. Peter Deutsch – Ghostscript, Assembler for PDP-1, XDS-940 timesharing system, QED original co-author
• Robert Dewar – IFIP WG 2.1 member, chairperson, ALGOL 68; AdaCore cofounder, president, CEO
• Edsger W. Dijkstra – contributions to ALGOL, Dijkstra's algorithm, Go To Statement Considered Harmful, IFIP WG 2.1 member
• Matt Dillon – programmed various software including DICE and DragonflyBSD
• Jack Dorsey – created Twitter
• Martin Dougiamas – creator and lead developed Moodle
• Adam Dunkels – authored Contiki operating system, the lwIP and uIP embedded TCP/IP stacks, invented protothreads

E

• Les Earnest – authored finger program
• Brendan Eich – created JavaScript
• Larry Ellison – co-created Oracle Database, co-founded Oracle Corporation
• Andrey Ershov – languages ALPHA, Rapira; first Soviet time-sharing system AIST-0, electronic publishing system RUBIN, multiprocessing 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 and Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN) Security Scanners
• Steve Fawkner – created Warlords and Puzzle Quest
• Stuart Feldman – created make, authored Fortran 77 compiler, part of original group that created Unix
• David Filo – co-created Yahoo!
• Brad Fitzpatrick – created memcached, Livejournal and OpenID
• Andrew Fluegelman – author PC-Talk communications software; considered a co-created shareware
• Martin Fowler – created Dependency Injection pattern of software engineering, a form of Inversion of control
• Brian Fox – created Bash, Readline, GNU Finger

G

• Elon Gasper – co-founded Bright Star Technology, patented realistic facial movements for in-game speech; HyperAnimator, Alphabet Blocks, etc.
• Bill Gates – Altair BASIC, co-founded 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
• John Gilmore – GNU Debugger (GDB)
• Adele Goldberg – co-created Smalltalk
• Ryan C. Gordon (a.k.a. Icculus) – Lokigames, ioquake3
• James Gosling – Java, Gosling Emacs, NeWS
• Bill Gosper – Macsyma, Lisp machine, hashlife, helped Donald Knuth on Vol.2 of The Art of Computer Programming (Semi-numerical algorithms)
• Andrew Gower – RuneScape Classic, RuneScape, co-founded Jagex
• Paul Gower – RuneScape Classic, RuneScape, co-founded Jagex
• Paul Graham – Yahoo! Store, On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp
• John Graham-Cumming – authored POPFile, a Bayesian filter-based e-mail classifier
• Ralph Griswold – co-created 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 (a.k.a. ScottGu) – ASP.NET creator
• Jürg Gutknecht – with Niklaus Wirth: Lilith computer; Modula-2, Oberon, Zonnon programming languages; Oberon operating system
• Andi Gutmans – co-created PHP programming language
• Michael Guy – Phoenix, work on number theory, computer algebra, higher dimension polyhedra theory, ALGOL 68C; work with John Horton Conway

H

• Daniel Ha – co-founder and CEO of blog comment platform Disqus
• Jim Hall – started the FreeDOS project
• Margaret Hamilton – Director of Software Engineering Division of MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the space Apollo program
• Eric Hehner – predicative programming, formal methods, quote notation, ALGOL
• David Heinemeier Hansson – created the Ruby on Rails framework for developing web applications
• Rebecca Heineman – authored Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate and Dragon Wars
• Anders Hejlsberg – Turbo Pascal, Borland Delphi, C#, TypeScript
• Ted Henter – founded Henter-Joyce (now part of Freedom Scientific) created JAWS screen reader software for blind people
• Andy Hertzfeld – co-created Macintosh, co-founded General Magic, co-founded Eazel
• D. Richard Hipp – created SQLite
• C. A. R. Hoare – first implementation of quicksort, ALGOL 60 compiler, Communicating sequential processes
• Grace Hopper – Harvard Mark I computer, FLOW-MATIC, COBOL
• David A. Huffman – created the Huffman Code compression algorithm
• Roger Hui – created J
• Dave Hyatt – co-authored Mozilla Firefox
• P. J. Hyett – co-founded GitHub

I

• Miguel de Icaza – GNOME project leader, initiator of Mono project
• Roberto Ierusalimschy – Lua leading architect
• Dan Ingalls – co-created Smalltalk and Bitblt
• Geir Ivarsøy – co-created Opera web browser
• Ken Iverson – APL, J
• Toru Iwatani – created Pac-Man

J

• Bo Jangeborg – Sinclair ZX Spectrum games
• Paul Jardetzky – authored server program for the first webcam
• Stephen C. Johnson – yacc
• Lynne Jolitz – 386BSD
• William Jolitz – 386BSD
• Bill Joy – BSD, csh, vi, co-founded Sun Microsystems
• 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 – Lotus 1-2-3, founded Lotus Development Corporation
• Phil Katz – created Zip (file format), authored PKZIP
• Ted Kaehler – contributions to Smalltalk, Squeak, HyperCard
• Alan Kay – Smalltalk, Dynabook, Object-oriented programming, Squeak
• Mel Kaye – LGP-30 and RPC-4000 machine code programmer at Royal McBee in the 1950s, famed as "Real Programmer" in the Story of Mel
• Stan Kelly-Bootle – Manchester Mark 1, The Devil's DP Dictionary
• John Kemeny – co-created BASIC
• Brian Kernighan – co-created AWK (being the K in that name), authored ditroff text-formatting tool
• Gary Kildall – CP/M, MP/M, BIOS, PL/M, also known for work on data-flow analysis, binary recompilers, multitasking operating systems, graphical user interfaces, disk caching, CD-ROM 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; co-created shareware
• 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 – 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, SECD machine, off-side rule, syntactic sugar, ALGOL, IFIP WG 2.1 member
• Tom Lane – main author of libjpeg, major developer of PostgreSQL
• Sam Lantinga – created Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL)
• Dick Lathwell – codeveloped APL\360
• Chris Lattner – main author of LLVM project
• Samuel J Leffler – 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)
• Charles H. Lindsey – IFIP WG 2.1 member Revised Report on ALGOL 68
• Håkon Wium Lie – co-authored Cascading Style Sheets
• Robert Love – Linux kernel developer
• Ada Lovelace – first programmer (of Charles Babbages' Analytical Engine)
• Al Lowe – created Leisure Suit Larry series
• David Luckham – Lisp, Automated theorem proving, Stanford Pascal 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 – created mIRC (Internet Relay Chat Client)
• Robert C. Martin – authored Clean Code, The Clean Coder, signatory on the Agile Manifesto, and leader of Clean Code movement
• John Mashey – authored PWB shell, also called Mashey shell
• Yukihiro Matsumoto – Ruby
• John McCarthy – Lisp, ALGOL, IFIP WG 2.1 member, artificial intelligence
• Craig McClanahan – original author Jakarta Struts, architect of Tomcat Catalina servlet container
• Daniel D. McCracken – professor at City College and authored Guide to Algol Programming, Guide to Cobol 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 – BSD, work on FFS, implementor of soft updates
• Sid Meier – author, Civilization and Railroad Tycoon, co-founded Microprose
• Bertrand Meyer – Eiffel, Object-oriented Software Construction, design by contract
• Bob Miner – co-created Oracle Database, co-founded Oracle Corporation
• Jeff Minter – psychedelic, and often llama-related video games
• Petr Mitrichev – competitive programmer
• Cleve Moler – co-authored LINPACK, EISPACK and MATLAB
• Lou Montulli – created Lynx 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 – authored text-editor Vim
• David A. Moon – Maclisp, ZetaLisp
• Charles H. Moore – created Forth language
• Roger Moore – co-developed APL\360, created IPSANET, co-founded I. P. Sharp Associates
• Matt Mullenweg – authored WordPress
• Boyd Munro – Australian developed GRASP, 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 – Backus–Naur form (BNF), ALGOL 60, IFIP WG 2.1 member
• Fredrik Neij – co-created The Pirate Bay
• Graham Nelson – created Inform authoring system for interactive fiction
• Klara Dan von Neumann – principal programmer for the MANIAC I
• Maurice Nivat – theoretical computer science, Theoretical Computer Science journal, ALGOL, IFIP WG 2.1 member
• Phiwa Nkambule – Co-founded Riovic, founded Cybatar
• Peter Norton – programmed Norton Utilities
• Kristen Nygaard – Simula, object-oriented programming

O

• Ed Oates – co-created Oracle Database, co-founded Oracle Corporation
• Martin Odersky – Scala
• Peter O'Hearn – separation logic, bunched logic, Infer Static Analyzer
• Jarkko Oikarinen – created Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
• Andrew and Philip Oliver, the Oliver Twins – many Sinclair ZX Spectrum games including Dizzy
• John Ousterhout – created Tcl/Tk

P

• Keith Packard – X Window System
• Larry Page – co-founded Google, Inc.
• Alexey Pajitnov – created game Tetris on Electronica 60
• Seymour Papert – Logo (programming language)
• 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, co-created UTF-8 character encoding, authored text editor sam and programming environment acme, main author of Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, and co-authored Go programming language
• Kent Pitman – technical contributor to the ANSI Common Lisp standard
• Tom Preston-Werner – co-founded GitHub

Q

R

• Theo de Raadt – founding member of NetBSD, founded OpenBSD and OpenSSH
• Brian Randell – ALGOL 60, 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 (The Humane Environment) program
• Eric Raymond – Open Source movement, authored fetchmail
• Hans Reiser – created ReiserFS file system
• John Resig – creator and lead developed jQuery JavaScript library
• Craig Reynolds – created boids computer graphics simulation
• John C. Reynolds – continuations, definitional interpreters, defunctionalization, Forsythe, Gedanken language, intersection types, polymorphic lambda calculus, relational parametricity, separation logic, ALGOL
• Dennis Ritchie – C, Unix, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Inferno
• Ron Rivest – co-created 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), Computer-aided design, structured analysis and design technique, ALGOL X
• Guido van Rossum – Python
• Jeff Rulifson – lead programmer on the NLS project
• Rusty Russell – created iptables for linux
• Steve Russell – first Lisp 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 and the Transport Tycoon series
• Bob Scheifler – X Window System, Jini
• Isai Scheinberg – IBM engineer, founded PokerStars
• Bill Schelter – GNU Maxima, GNU Common Lisp
• John Scholes – Direct functions
• Randal L. Schwartz – Just another Perl hacker
• Adi Shamir – co-created 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, for Ruby web applications
• Emily Short – prolific writer of Interactive fiction and co-developed Inform version 7
• Jacek Sieka – developed DC++ an open-source, peer-to-peer file-sharing client
• Ken Silverman – created Duke Nukem 3D's graphics engine
• Charles Simonyi – Hungarian notation, Bravo (the first WYSIWYG text editor), Microsoft Word
• Colin Simpson – developed CircuitLogix simulation software
• Rich Skrenta – co-founded DMOZ
• Matthew Smith – Sinclair ZX Spectrum games, including Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy
• Henry Spencer – C News, Regex
• Joel Spolsky – co-founded Fog Creek Software and Stack Overflow
• Quentin Stafford-Fraser – authored original 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, 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 – co-created PHP language
• Gerald Jay Sussman – Scheme
• Herb Sutter – chair of ISO C++ standards committee and C++ expert
• Gottfrid Svartholm – co-created The Pirate Bay
• Aaron Swartz – software developer, writer, Internet activist
• Tim Sweeney – The Unreal engine, UnrealScript, ZZT

T

• Amir Taaki – Leading developer for Bitcoin project
• Andrew Tanenbaum – Minix
• Audrey "Autrijus" Tang – designed Pugs
• Simon Tatham – Netwide Assembler (NASM), PuTTY
• Larry Tesler – the Smalltalk code browser, debugger and object inspector, and (with Tim Mott) the Gypsy word processor
• Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner – co-created Opera web browser
• Avie Tevanian – authored Mach kernel
• Ken Thompson – mainly designed and authored Unix, Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, B and Bon languages (precursors of C), created UTF-8 character encoding, introduced regular expressions in QED and co-authored 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, Rsync
• Roy Trubshaw – MUD – together with Richard Bartle, created MUDs
• Bob Truel – co-founded DMOZ
• Alan Turing – mathematician, computer scientist and cryptanalyst
• David Turner – SASL, Kent Recursive Calculator, Miranda, IFIP WG 2.1 member

U

V

• Wietse Venema – 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 – co-founded Autodesk
• Larry Wall – Warp (1980s space-war game), rn, patch, Perl
• Bob Wallace – author PC-Write word processor; considered shareware co-creator
• Chris Wanstrath – co-founded GitHub
• John Warnock – created PostScript
• Robert Watson – FreeBSD network stack parallelism, TrustedBSD project and OpenBSM
• Joseph Henry Wegstein – ALGOL 58, ALGOL 60, IFIP WG 2.1 member, data processing technical standards, fingerprint analysis
• Pei-Yuan Wei – authored ViolaWWW, one of earliest graphical browsers
• Peter J. Weinberger – co-created 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 – co-created subroutine; designed WAKE; co-designed Tiny Encryption Algorithm, XTEA, Burrows–Wheeler transform
• Arthur Whitney – A+, 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 – created and co-founded language Logo
• Roberta and Ken Williams – Sierra Entertainment, King's Quest, graphic adventure game
• Sophie Wilson – designed instruction set for Acorn RISC Machine, authored BBC BASIC
• Dave Winer – developed XML-RPC, Frontier scripting language
• Niklaus Wirth – ALGOL W, IFIP WG 2.1 member, Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon
• Stephen Wolfram – created Mathematica
• Don Woods – INTERCAL, Colossal Cave Adventure
• Philip Woodward – ambiguity function, sinc function, comb operator, rep operator, ALGOL 68-R
• Steve Wozniak – Breakout, Apple Integer BASIC, co-founded Apple Inc.
• Will Wright – created the Sim City series, co-founded Maxis

Y

• Jerry Yang – co-created 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 – Lucid Emacs, Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, XScreenSaver
• Phil Zimmermann – created encryption software 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)