List of programmers

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This is a list of programmers notable for their contributions to software, either as original author or architect, or for later additions.

See also: Game programmer, List of computer scientists, Free Software authors

A - B - C - D - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M - N - R - S - T - V - W - Z

A

Clifford Adams - author of the UseModWiki wiki software
Leonard Adleman - co-inventor of the RSA algorithm (the A in the name stands for Adleman), coined the term computer virus
Alfred Aho - co-creator of AWK programming language (the A in the name stands for Aho)
Paul Allen - Altair BASIC, Applesoft II BASIC, co-founded Microsoft
Eric Allman - sendmail, syslog
Marc Andreessen - co-creator of Mosaic, co-founder of Netscape
Bill Atkinson - QuickDraw, HyperCard

B

John Backus - FORTRAN, BNF
Kailash Balnac - Metatag
Richard Bartle - MUD, with Roy Trubshaw, the father of MUDs
Donald Becker - Linux Ethernet drivers, Beowulf clustering
Doug Bell - Dungeon Master series of computer games
Sir Tim Berners-Lee - inventor of the World Wide Web
Brian Behlendorf - Apache
Daniel J. Bernstein - djbdns, qmail
Eric Bina - co-creator of Mosaic web browser
Deane Blazie founder of Blazie Engineering (now part of Freedom Scientific), created technology for blind people who use braille
Bert Bos - author of Argo web browser, co-author of Cascading Style Sheets
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 Bresenham - creator of Bresenham's line algorithm
Dan Bricklin - co-creator of VisiCalc, the first personal spreadsheet program
Sergey Brin - co-creator of Google
Richard Brodie - Microsoft Word
Danielle Bunten Berry (Dani Bunten) - M.U.L.E., multiplayer video game
Jim Button - author PC-File flatfile database; he is considered one of the fathers of shareware

C

Steve Capps - co-creator of Macintosh and Newton
John Carmack - first person shooters Doom, Quake
Vinton Cerf - TCP/IP, NCP
Steve Chamberlain - BFD, Cygwin
Sherry Chen - programmer extraordinare
Alain Colmerauer - Prolog
Mike Cowlishaw - REXX and NetRexx, LEXX editor, image processing, decimal arithmetic packages
Alan Cooper - Visual Basic
Alan Cox - a developer of the Linux kernel
Brad Cox - Objective-C
Mark Crispin – inventor of IMAP, author of UW-IMAP, one of the reference implementations of IMAP4
Ward Christensen - Wrote the first BBS (Bulletin Board System) system CBBS
William Crowther - Colossal Cave Adventure
Ward Cunningham - inventor of the WikiWiki concept
Dave Cutler - architect of Windows NT, VMS

D - F

James Duncan Davidson - creator of Tomcat, now part of the Jakarta Project
L. Peter Deutsch - Ghostscript, Assembler for PDP-1, XDS-940 timesharing system, QED original co-author
Edsger Dijkstra - contributions to ALGOL, Dijkstra's algorithm, Go To Statement Considered Harmful
Matt Dillon, programmer of various software including DICE and DragonflyBSD
Les Earnest - author of the 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
Stuart Feldman - creator of make, author of Fortran 77 compiler, part of original group that created Unix
Jay Fenlason - original hack, GAS
David Filo - co-creator of Yahoo!
Andrew Fluegelman - author PC-Talk communications software; he is considered one of the fathers of shareware
Brian Fox - creator of Bash, Readline, GNU Finger, Meta-HTML
Peter Fraser - FRED text editor
Jim Fruchterman founder of Arkenstone (now part of Freedom Scientific) created scanners for blind people
Dan Farmer Creator of COPS and SATAN Security Scanners

G - H

Elon Gasper - co-founded BrightStar Technology, patented realistic facial movements for in-game speech. HyperAnimator, Alphabet Blocks, etc.
Bill Gates - Altair BASIC, Apple II BASIC, co-founded Microsoft
John Gilmore - GDB
Adele Goldberg - co-inventor of Smalltalk
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)
Paul Graham - Yahoo! Store, On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp
John Graham-Cumming - author of POPFile, a Bayesian filter-based e-mail classifier
Richard Greenblatt - Lisp machine, Incompatible Timesharing System, MacHack
Ralph Griswold - co-creator of SNOBOL and creator of Icon programming language.
Andi Gutmans - co-creator of PHP programming language
Douglas Richard Hanks, Jr. - creator of Sudosh and [Enterprise Audit Shell (EAS)]
Brian Harvey - UCB Logo, see Logo programming language
Cecil Hastings - wrote the classic Approximations for Digital Computers 1950s formulas for sin, cos, etc.
David Heinemeier Hansson - created the Ruby on Rails framework for developing web applications.
Anders Hejlsberg - Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#
Ted Henter founder of Henter-Joyce (now part of Freedom Scientific) creator of Jaws, voice software for blind people
Andy Hertzfeld - co-creator of Macintosh, co-founder of General Magic, co-founder of Eazel
C. A. R. Hoare - first implementation of quicksort, Algol 60 compiler, Communicating sequential processes
Joshua Holloway - Perl implementation of the MSN Messenger API
Grace Hopper - Navy Mark I computer, FLOW-MATIC (which heavily influenced COBOL)
Dave Hyatt - co-author of Mozilla Firefox

I - J

Miguel de Icaza - GNOME project leader, initiator of the Mono project
Dan Ingalls - co-inventor of Smalltalk, Bitblt, and Pop-up Menus
Ken Iverson - APL, J
Toru Iwatani - creator of Pac-Man
Bo Jangeborg - ZX Spectrum games
Paul Jardetzky - author of the server program for the first webcam
Stephen C. Johnson - yacc
Lynne Jolitz - 386BSD
William Jolitz - 386BSD
Bill Joy - BSD, vi; founded Sun Microsystems
Robert K. Jung - creator of ARJ

K - L

Ted Kaehler - co-inventor of Smalltalk
Pavel Kanzelsberger - creator of Pixel image editor
Mitch Kapor - Lotus 1-2-3, founded Lotus Development Corporation
Phil Katz - creator of the ZIP file format, author of PKZIP
Mel Kaye [link], a Real Programmer
Stan Kelly-Bootle - Manchester Mark I, The Devil's DP Dictionary
Brian Kernighan - co-creator of AWK programming language (the K in the name stands for Kernighan), author of ditroff text-formatting tool
Gary Kildall - CP/M
Tom Knight - Incompatible Timesharing System
Donald E. Knuth - TeX, CWEB, Metafont, The Art of Computer Programming
Leslie Lamport - LaTeX
Butler Lampson - QED original co-author
Tom Lane - primary author of libjpeg, major developer of PostgreSQL
Dick Lathwell - co-developer of APL360
Greg Lehey - FreeBSD developer, originator of the Vinum Volume Manager
Rasmus Lerdorf - original creator of PHP
Michael Lesk - Lex
Graziano Liberati - co-author of ZNF
Håkon Wium Lie - co-author of Cascading Style Sheets
Robert Love - Linux kernel developer
Ada Lovelace - First programmer (of Babbage Machines)

M

Raphael Manfredi - contributions to Perl, software architect and maintainer of gtk-gnutella
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 Fortran Programming (1957)
Michael McGrady - creator of custom browse buttons for file uploads, Java, aeronautics and astronautics distributed computing.
Douglas McIlroy - pipes and filters, concept of software componentry, Unix tools (spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, tr, etc.)
Marshall Kirk McKusick - BSD
Bertrand Meyer - Eiffel, Object-oriented Software Construction, Design by contract
Bob Miner - co-creator of Oracle database, co-founder of Oracle Corporation
Jeff Minter - Psychedelic, and often llama-related video games
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 Moon - Maclisp, ZetaLisp
Charles H. Moore - inventor of the Forth programming language
Roger Moore - co-developer of APL360, creator of IPSANET, co-founder of I.P. Sharp Associates
Urban Müller - Brainfuck language
Mike Muuss - author of ping, network tool to detect hosts

N - R

Graham Nelson - creator of the Inform authoring system for Interactive fiction
Col Needham - creator of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
Peter Norton - programmer of the famous file manager program, Norton Commander
Kristen Nygaard - SIMULA
Ed Oates - co-creator of Oracle database, co-founder of Oracle Corporation
Jarkko Oikarinen - creator of Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
Andrew and Philip Oliver, The Oliver Twins - Many ZX Spectrum games including Dizzy
Larry Page - co-creator of Google
Seymour Papert - Logo programming language
Tim Paterson - QDOS
Alexey Pajitnov - inventor of the game Tetris on the Electronica 60
Charles Petzold - author of many Microsoft Windows programming books
Jeffrey Peterson - key F/OSS architect, creator of Quepasa
Rob Pike - Wrote first bitmaped 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
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
Dennis Ritchie - C, Unix, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Inferno
Ron Rivest - co-inventor of the RSA algorithm (the R in the name stands for Rivest)
Marc J. Rochkind - SCCS, see SCM, SCM History
Blake Ross - co-author of Mozilla Firefox
Alessandro Rossini - co-author of ZNF
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 computer game.
Benoit Minisini - Creator of Gambas, a Visual Basic like programming language.

S

Bob Sabiston - Rotoshop, interpolating rotoscope animation software
Bill Schelter - GNU Maxima, GNU Common Lisp
Randal L. Schwartz - Just another Perl hacker
Emily Short - prolific writer of Interactive fiction and co-developer of Inform version 7
Ken Silverman - creator of Duke Nukem 3D's graphics engine
Adi Shamir - co-inventor of the RSA algorithm (the S in the name stands for Shamir)
Cliff Shaw - IPL, the first AI language
Charles Simonyi - Hungarian notation, Microsoft Word
Matthew Smith - ZX Spectrum games, including Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy
Santiago Lizardo Oscares - Molins, Jerba, GPGEXT
Henry Spencer - C News, Regex
Quentin Stafford-Fraser - author of the original VNC viewer, first Windows VNC server, client program for the first webcam
Richard Stallman - Emacs, GCC, GDB, founder and pioneer of the GNU Project, terminal-independent I/O pioneer on ITS, Lisp machine manual (chineual)
Guy Steele - Common Lisp, Scheme
Bjarne Stroustrup - C++
Zeev Suraski - co-creator of PHP programming language
Gerald Jay Sussman - Scheme
Tim Sweeney - The Unreal engine, UnrealScript, ZZT
Rich Skrenta, co-founder of the Open Directory Project

T - V

Andrew Tanenbaum - Minix
Audrey "Autrijus" Tang - designer of Pugs
Simon Tatham - NASM, PuTTY
Larry Tesler - the PUB markup language, the Smalltalk browser, debugger and inspector, and (with Tim Mott) the Gypsy word processor
Avie Tevanian - author of the Mach kernel
Ken Thompson - main designer and author of Unix, Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, B and Bon programming languages (precursors of C), inventor of UTF-8 character encoding, introduced regular expressions in QED.
Michael Tiemann - GCC
Linus Torvalds - original author and current maintainer of the Linux kernel
Michael Toy - co-developer of the computer game Rogue
Roy Trubshaw - MUD - together with Richard Bartle, the father of MUDs
Andrew Tridgell - Samba, Rsync
Bob Truel, co-founder of the Open Directory Project
Wietse Venema - Postfix, SATAN, TCP Wrapper
Paul Vixie - BIND, Cron

W - Z

Larry Wall - warp, rn, patch, Perl
Bob Wallace - author PC-Write word processor; he is considered one of the fathers of shareware
John Walker, co-founder of Autodesk
John Warnock - creator of PostScript
Pei-Yuan Wei - author of Viola, one of the earliest graphical browsers
Peter Weinberger - co-creator of AWK programming language (the W in the name stands for Weinberger)
David Wheeler - co-inventor of the subroutine; designer of WAKE; co-designer of Tiny Encryption Algorithm, XTEA, Burrows-Wheeler transform. (see http://www.dwheeler.com/dwheeler.html); this refers to several David Wheelers in computing
Arthur Whitney - A+, K
Roberta and Ken Williams -- Sierra Entertainment, King's Quest, graphic adventure game
Dave Winer – developed XML-RPC, Frontier scripting language
Niklaus Wirth - Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon
Don Woods - INTERCAL, Colossal Cave Adventure
Steve Wozniak - Breakout, Apple Integer BASIC, founded Apple Computer (with Steve Jobs)
Jerry Yang - co-creator of Yahoo!
Jamie Zawinski - Lucid Emacs, Netscape, Mozilla, XScreenSaver

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