My Top Ten Programmers

Before I get too old to remember I thought I’d post the names of the amazing programmers that have had the most influence on not only my career but my life:

1. Bill Joy – for pretty much everything, see this post.
2. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson – for Unix.
3. Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie – for the “C” Programming Language.
4. Alfred Aho and Jeffrey Ullman – Principles of Compiler Design Book – the Dragon Book.
5. Larry Wall – for the Perl Programming Language.
6. Linus Torvalds – for Linux.
7. Dries Buytaert – for Drupal.
8. Guido van Rossum – for Python.
9. Richard Stallman – for Emacs, GNU, and Free Software Foundation.
10. John Backus, Niklaus Wirth and Edsger Dijkstra – for the development of modern programming languages that make it all possible.

I know there are others (Alan Turing and John Von Neumann are obvious), but these guys spring to the top of my mind. If you are a fan of Outliers you’ll notice how many of these guys were born in the early 50’s – that seems to be the time when many of the great programmers were born.