List of programmers

A

Scott Adams – one of earliest developers of CP/M and DOS games

Leonard Adleman – co-creator of RSA algorithm (the A in the name stands for Adleman), coined the term computer virus

Alfred Aho – co-creator of AWK (the A in the name stands for Aho), and main author of famous 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-creator of Mosaic, co-founder of Netscape

Jeremy Ashkenas – creator of the CoffeeScript programming language and Backbone.js

Bill Atkinson – QuickDraw, HyperCard

B

John Backus – FORTRAN, BNF

Lars Bak – virtual machine specialist

Richard Bartle – MUD, with Roy Trubshaw, creator of MUDs

Brian Behlendorf – Apache

Kent Beck – created Extreme Programming and co-creator of JUnit

Donald Becker – Linux Ethernet drivers, Beowulf clustering

Doug Bell – Dungeon Master series of video games

Fabrice Bellard – creator of FFmpeg open codec library, QEMU virtualization tools

Tim Berners-Lee – inventor of World Wide Web

Daniel J. Bernstein – djbdns, qmail

Sabeer Bhatia – co-founder of the Hotmail email service

Eric Bina – co-creator of Mosaic web browser

Marc Blank – co-creator of Zork

Joshua Bloch – core Java language designer, lead the Java collections framework project

Grady Booch – co-creator of Unified Modeling Language

Bert Bos – author of Argo web browser, co-author of Cascading Style Sheets

Stephen Richard Bourne – Creator of 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 – co-developer of APL360

Jack E. Bresenham – creator of Bresenham's line algorithm

Dan Bricklin – co-creator of VisiCalc, the first personal spreadsheet program

Walter Bright – Digital Mars, First C++ compiler, author of D (programming language).

Sergey Brin – co-founder of Google Inc.

Richard Brodie – Microsoft Word

Andries Brouwer – Hack, former maintainer of man pager man(1), Linux kernel hacker

Danielle Bunten Berry (Dani Bunten) – M.U.L.E., multiplayer video game and other noted video games

Dries Buytaert – creator of Drupal

C

Steve Capps – co-creator of Macintosh and Newton

John D. Carmack – first person shooters Doom, Quake

Vinton Cerf – TCP/IP, NCP

Ward Christensen – wrote the first BBS (Bulletin Board System) system CBBS

Edgar F. Codd – principal architect of the relational model

Bram Cohen – BitTorrent protocol design and implementation

Alain Colmerauer – Prolog

Alan Cooper – Visual Basic

Alan Cox – co-developer of Linux kernel

Brad Cox – Objective-C

Mike Cowlishaw – REXX and NetRexx, LEXX editor, image processing, decimal arithmetic packages

Mark Crispin – creator of IMAP, author of UW-IMAP, one of reference implementations of IMAP4

Ward Cunningham – creator of Wiki concept

William Crowther – Colossal Cave Adventure

Dave Cutler – architect of VMS, Windows NT

D

Ole-Johan Dahl – co-creator of SIMULA

James Duncan Davidson – creator of Tomcat, now part of Jakarta Project

Jeff Dean – Spanner, BigTable, Map Reduce

L. Peter Deutsch – Ghostscript, Assembler for PDP-1, XDS-940 timesharing system, QED original co-author

Edsger Dijkstra – contributions to ALGOL, Dijkstra's algorithm, Goto Statement Considered Harmful

Matt Dillon – programmer of various software including DICE and DragonflyBSD

Jack Dorsey – creator of Twitter

Martin Dougiamas – creator and lead developer of Moodle

Adam Dunkels – author of Contiki operating system, the lwIP and uIP embedded TCP/IP stacks, inventor of protothreads

E

Les Earnest – author of finger program

Brendan Eich – creator of JavaScript

Larry Ellison – co-creator of Oracle database, co-founder of Oracle Corporation

Marc Ewing – creator of Red Hat Linux

F

Dan Farmer – creator of COPS and Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN) Security Scanners

Steve Fawkner – creator of Warlords and Puzzle Quest

Stuart Feldman – creator of make, author of Fortran 77 compiler, part of original group that created Unix

David Filo – co-creator of Yahoo!

Brad Fitzpatrick – creator of memcached, Livejournal and OpenID

Andrew Fluegelman – author PC-Talk communications software; considered a co-creator of shareware

Brian Fox – creator of Bash, Readline, GNU Finger, Meta-HTML

Martin Fowler – creator of Dependency Injection pattern of software engineering, a form of Inversion of control

Jim Fruchterman – founder of Arkenstone (now part of Freedom Scientific) and Benetech, created scanners for blind people

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

Jim Gettys – X Window System, HTTP/1.1, One Laptop per Child, Bufferbloat

Steve Gibson – creator of SpinRite

John Gilmore – GDB

Adele Goldberg – co-creator of Smalltalk

Ryan C. Gordon (a.k.a. Icculus) – Lokigames, ioquake3, MojoSetup, etc.

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 – author of POPFile, a Bayesian filter-based e-mail classifier

Ralph Griswold – co-creator of SNOBOL, creator of Icon (programming language)

Richard Greenblatt – Lisp machine, Incompatible Timesharing System, MacHack

Neil J. Gunther — author of PDQ (Pretty Damn Quick) performance modeling program

Scott Guthrie, (a.k.a. ScottGu) – ASP.NET Creator

Andi Gutmans – co-creator of PHP programming language

H

Daniel Ha – co-founder and CEO of blog comment platform Disqus.

Jim Hall – started the FreeDOS project

David Heinemeier Hansson – created the Ruby on Rails framework for developing web applications.

David Albert Huffman – created the Huffman Code compression algorithm.

Rebecca Heineman – author of Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate and Dragon Wars.

Anders Hejlsberg – Turbo Pascal, Borland Delphi, C#, TypeScript

Ted Henter – founder of Henter-Joyce (now part of Freedom Scientific) creator of Jaws, screen reader software for blind people

Andy Hertzfeld – co-creator of Macintosh, co-founder of General Magic, co-founder of Eazel

Rich Hickey – creator of Clojure language

D. Richard Hipp – creator of SQLite

C. A. R. Hoare – first implementation of quicksort, ALGOL 60 compiler, Communicating sequential processes

Grace Hopper – Harvard Mark I computer, FLOW-MATIC, COBOL

Dave Hyatt – co-author of Mozilla Firefox

I

Miguel de Icaza – GNOME project leader, initiator of Mono project

Roberto Ierusalimschy – Lua leading architect

Dan Ingalls – co-creator of Smalltalk and Bitblt

Geir Ivarsøy – co-creator of Opera web browser

Ken Iverson – APL, J

Toru Iwatani – creator of Pac-Man

J

Bo Jangeborg – Sinclair ZX Spectrum games

Paul Jardetzky – author of server program for the first webcam

Lynne Jolitz – 386BSD

William Jolitz – 386BSD

Stephen C. Johnson – yacc

Bill Joy – BSD, csh, vi, co-founder of Sun Microsystems

Robert K. Jung – creator of ARJ

K

Poul-Henning Kamp – MD5 password hash algorithm, FreeBSD GEOM and GBDE, part of the UFS2, FreeBSD Jails, malloc and the Beerware license

Mitch Kapor – Lotus 1-2-3, founded Lotus Development Corporation

Phil Katz – creator of ZIP file format, author of PKZIP

Alan Kay – Smalltalk, Dynabook, Object-oriented programming, Squeak

Mel Kaye – a LGP-30 and RPC-4000 machine code programmer at Royal McBee in the 1950s, famed as "Real Programmer" in the Story of Mel.

John Kemeny – co-creator of BASIC

Stan Kelly-Bootle – Manchester Mark 1, The Devil's DP Dictionary

Brian Kernighan – co-creator of AWK (the K in the name stands for Kernighan), author of 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, and for being the founder of Digital Research (DRI)

Tom Knight – Incompatible Timesharing System

Jim Knopf – a.k.a. Jim Button, author PC-File flatfile database; considered a co-creator of shareware

Donald E. Knuth – TeX, CWEB, Metafont, The Art of Computer Programming, Concrete Mathematics

Andrew R. Koenig – co-author of books on C and C++ and former Project Editor of the ISO/ANSI standards committee for C++

L

Andre LaMothe- creator of the XGameStation, one of the world's first video game console development kits

Tom Lane – primary author of libjpeg, major developer of PostgreSQL

Leslie Lamport – LaTeX

Butler Lampson – QED original co-author

Sam Lantinga – creator of SDL

Dick Lathwell – co-developer of APL360

Chris Lattner – primary author of LLVM project

Samuel J Leffler – BSD, FlexFAX, libtiff, FreeBSD Wireless Device Drivers

Rasmus Lerdorf – original creator of PHP

Michael Lesk – Lex

Gordon Letwin – architect of OS/2, author of HPFS file system

Håkon Wium Lie – co-author of Cascading Style Sheets

Robert Love – Linux kernel developer

Ada Lovelace – first programmer (of Charles Babbages' Analytical Engine)

Al Lowe – creator of Leisure Suit Larry series

M

Khaled Mardam-Bey – xreator of mIRC (Internet Relay Chat Client)

Robert Cecil Martin – author of Clean Code, The Clean Coder, signatory on the Agile Manifesto, and leader of the Clean Code movement.

John Mashey - author of the PWB shell, also known as the Mashey shell.

Yukihiro Matsumoto – Ruby

John McCarthy – Lisp

Craig McClanahan – original author of Jakarta Struts, architect of Tomcat Catalina servlet container

Daniel D. McCracken – professor at City College and author of Guide to Algol Programming, Guide to Cobol Programming, Guide to Fortran Programming (1957)

Douglas McIlroy – pipes and filters, concept of software componentry, Unix tools (spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, tr, etc.)

Shawn McKenzie – AutoTheme

Marshall Kirk McKusick – BSD, work on FFS, implementor of soft updates

Sid Meier – author, Civilization (series) and Railroad Tycoon, cofounded Microprose

Bertrand Meyer – Eiffel, Object-oriented Software Construction, Design by contract

Scott Meyers – author, software consultant, C++ expert

Bob Miner – co-creator of Oracle database, co-founder of Oracle Corporation

Jeff Minter – psychedelic, and often llama-related video games

Cleve Moler – co-author of LINPACK, EISPACK and MATLAB

Lou Montulli – creator of 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 – author of text-editor Vim

David A. Moon – Maclisp, ZetaLisp

Charles H. Moore – creator of Forth language

Roger Moore – co-developer of APL360, creator of IPSANET, co-founder of I.P. Sharp Associates

Matt Mullenweg – author of WordPress

Boyd Munro – Australian developer of GRASP, owner of SDI, one of the earliest software development companies

Mike Muuss – author of ping, network tool to detect hosts

N

Patrick Naughton – early Java designer, xlock, HotJava

Peter Naur – Backus-Naur form, ALGOL 60

Fredrik Neij – co-creator of The Pirate Bay

Graham Nelson – creator of Inform authoring system for Interactive fiction

Peter Norton – programmer of the famous utility program, Norton Utilities

Kristen Nygaard – SIMULA

O

Ed Oates – co-creator of Oracle database, co-founder of Oracle Corporation

Martin Odersky – Scala

Jarkko Oikarinen – creator of Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

Andrew and Philip Oliver, The Oliver Twins – Many Sinclair ZX Spectrum games including Dizzy

John Ousterhout – creator of Tcl/Tk

P

Keith Packard – X Window System

Larry Page – co-founder of Google, Inc.

Alexey Pajitnov – creator of game Tetris on Electronica 60

Seymour Papert – Logo (programming language)

Tim Paterson – author of 86-DOS (QDOS)

Markus Persson – creator of Minecraft

Petr Mitrichev – considered one of the best algorithmists in the world today

Jeffrey Peterson – key free and open source software architect, creator of Quepasa

Charles Petzold – author of many Microsoft Windows programming books

Rob Pike – wrote first bitmapped window system for Unix, co-creator of UTF-8 character encoding, author of text editor sam and programming environment acme, main author of Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, and co-author of the Go (programming language)

Kent Pitman – technical contributor to the ANSI Common Lisp standard

R

Theo de Raadt – founding member of NetBSD, founder of OpenBSD and OpenSSH

Jef Raskin – started the Macintosh project in Apple Computer, designed Canon Cat computer, developed The Humane Environment program

Eric Raymond – Open Source movement, author of fetchmail

Hans Reiser – creator of ReiserFS file system.

John Resig – creator and lead developer of jQuery JavaScript library

Craig Reynolds – creator of boids computer graphics simulation

Dennis Ritchie – C, Unix, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Inferno

Ron Rivest – co-creator of RSA algorithm (the R in the name stands for Rivest). Creator of RC4 and MD5.

John Romero – first person shooters Doom, Quake

Blake Ross – co-author of Mozilla Firefox

Guido van Rossum – Python

Jeff Rulifson – lead programmer on the NLS project

Rusty Russell – creator of 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 – developer of RollerCoaster Tycoon and the Transport Tycoon series

Bob Scheifler – X Window System, Jini

Bill Schelter – GNU Maxima, GNU Common Lisp

Aaron Swartz – software developer, writer, Internet activist

Randal L. Schwartz – Just another Perl hacker

Adi Shamir – co-creator of RSA algorithm (the S in the name stands for Shamir)

Mike Shaver – founding member of Mozilla Organization

Cliff Shaw – 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-developer of Inform version 7

Jacek Sieka – developer of DC++ an open-source, peer-to-peer file-sharing client

Ken Silverman – creator of Duke Nukem 3D's graphics engine

Charles Simonyi – Hungarian notation, Bravo (the first WYSIWYG text editor), Microsoft Word.

Colin Simpson – developer of CircuitLogix simulation software

Rich Skrenta – co-founder of DMOZ

Matthew Smith – Sinclair ZX Spectrum games, including Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy

Henry Spencer – C News, Regex

Joel Spolsky – co-founder of Fog Creek Software and Stack Overflow

Quentin Stafford-Fraser – author of original VNC viewer, first Windows VNC server, client program for the first webcam

Richard Stallman – Emacs, GCC, GDB, founder and pioneer of GNU Project, terminal-independent I/O pioneer on ITS, Lisp machine manual

Guy Steele – Common Lisp, Scheme, Java

Alexander Stepanov – creator of Standard Template Library

Christopher Strachey – draughts playing program

Ludvig Strigeus – creator of uTorrent, OpenTTD, ScummVM and the technology behind Spotify

Bjarne Stroustrup – creator of C++

Zeev Suraski – co-creator of PHP language

Gerald Jay Sussman – Scheme

Herb Sutter – chair of the ISO C++ standards committee and C++ expert.

Gottfrid Svartholm – co-creator of The Pirate Bay

Tim Sweeney – The Unreal engine, UnrealScript, ZZT

T

Amir Taaki – Leading developer for the Bitcoin project

Andrew Tanenbaum – Minix

Audrey "Autrijus" Tang – designer of Pugs

Simon Tatham – NASM, PuTTY

Larry Tesler – the PUB markup language, the Smalltalk code browser, debugger and object inspector, and (with Tim Mott) the Gypsy word processor

Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner – co-creator of Opera web browser

Avie Tevanian – author of Mach kernel

Ken Thompson – main designer and author of Unix, Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, B and Bon languages (precursors of C), creator of UTF-8 character encoding, introduced regular expressions in QED and co-author of the Go (programming language)

Michael Tiemann – G++, GCC

Linus Torvalds – original author and current maintainer of Linux kernel and creator of Git, a source code management system

Andrew Tridgell – Samba, Rsync

Roy Trubshaw – MUD – together with Richard Bartle, creator of MUDs

Bob Truel – co-founder of DMOZ

Alan Turing

V

Wietse Venema – Postfix, Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN), TCP Wrapper

Pat Villani – original author of the FreeDOS/DOS-C kernel, maintainer of a defunct "Linux for Windows 9x" distribution

Paul Vixie – BIND, Cron

Patrick Volkerding – Original author and the current maintainer of Slackware Linux Distribution

W

Larry Wall – Warp (1980s space-war game), rn, patch, Perl

Bob Wallace – author PC-Write word processor; considered a co-creator of shareware

John Walker – co-founder of Autodesk

John Warnock – creator of PostScript

Joseph Weizenbaum – creator of ELIZA

Robert Watson – FreeBSD network stack parallelism, TrustedBSD project and OpenBSM

Pei-Yuan Wei – author of Viola, one of earliest graphical browsers

Peter J. Weinberger – co-creator of AWK (the W in the name stands for Weinberger)

Jim Weirich – creator of Rake, Builder, and Ruby Gems for Ruby, and a popular teacher and conference speaker.

David Wheeler – co-creator of subroutine; designer of WAKE; co-designer of Tiny Encryption Algorithm, XTEA, Burrows-Wheeler transform.

Arthur Whitney – A+, K

why the lucky stiff – creator of libraries and writing for Ruby, as well as a quirky and popular guide to learning programming

Bruce Wilcox – creator of Computer Go, programmed NEMESIS Go Master.

Evan Williams – creator and co-founder Logo (programming language)

Roberta and Ken Williams – Sierra Entertainment, King's Quest, graphic adventure game

Sophie Wilson – designer of instruction set for Acorn RISC Machine, author of BBC BASIC.

Dave Winer – developed XML-RPC, Frontier scripting language

Niklaus Wirth – Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon

Stephen Wolfram – creator of Mathematica

Don Woods – INTERCAL, Colossal Cave Adventure

Steve Wozniak – Breakout, Apple Integer BASIC, co-founder of Apple Inc.

Will Wright – created the Sim City series and co-founded Maxis

Y

Jerry Yang – co-creator of Yahoo!

Victor Yngve – author of first string processing language, COMIT

Z

Jamie Zawinski – Lucid Emacs, Netscape, Mozilla, XScreenSaver

Philip Zimmermann – creator of encryption software PGP, the ZRTP protocol, and Zfone

Mark Zuckerberg – creator of Facebook

Matei Zaharia – creator of Apache Spark