30 Most Influential People In Programming

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30 Most Influential People In Programming

Written by Administrator LAST UPDATED | 18 January 2010

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Today we want to show off our favorite 30 programmers who have inspired and influenced so many people to become better programmers. Let us know who has inspired you to start and become a better programmer!

* * * 30 People Who Know Lots About Programming * * *

#1 Tim Berners-Lee
		Tim Berners-Lee’s Websites Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee - About Tim Berners-Lee Tim is the Inventor of HTML (hyper text markup language) and the World Wide Web. - In 2007, he was ranked Joint First, alongside Albert Hofmann, in The Telegraph’s list of 100 greatest living geniuses.

#2 Matt Mullenweg
		Matt Mullenweg’s Websites Matt – http://ma.tt Wordpress – http://www.wordpress.com Wordpress Blog – http://matt.wordpress.com Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Mullenweg - About Matt Mullenweg Matt is the founder and creator of the open source WordPress blogging platform. - In 2005, he founded the company Automattic, the company behind WordPress and Akismet.

#3 Larry Page
		Larry Page’s Websites Google – http://www.google.com Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page - About Larry Page Larry Page is best known for the co-founder of Google, alongside Sergy Brin. - He is the 6th richest person in America, and the 27th richest billionaire worldwide according to Forbes.

#4 Sergey Brin
		Sergey Brin’s Websites Google – http://www.google.com Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin - About Sergey Brin Sergey was the co-founder of Google alongside Larry Page. - Sergey is ranked the 28th most richest person in the world according to the Forbes top 50 richest billionaires list 2009.

#5 Linus Torvalds
		Linus Torvalds Websites Linux – http://www.linux.org/info/linus.html Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds - About Linus Torvalds Linux is the creator of the extremely popular Linux open source operating system. - Today, there are thousands of variations / distributions of Linux and many web servers run on it. Linus sure did create something ecstatic!
Dennis Ritchie
		Dennis Ritchie’s Websites 1 – http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/ C Programming Language Book – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language_(book) Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie - About Dennis Ritchie Dennis is best known for the creator of C and a huge key developer of the UNIX operating system. - He was born in 1941, and received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998

#7 Brian Kernighan
		Brian Kernighan’s Websites Bell Labs – http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/bwk/ C Programming Language Book – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language_(book) Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan - About Brian Kernighan Kernigham developed the UNIX operating system along side Ritchie and Thompson. - Brian is the author of many UNIX programmes, and is known as the coiner of the expression WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).

#8 Ken Thompson
		Ken Thompson’s Websites Bell Labs – http://plan9.bell-labs.com/who/ken/ Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson_(programmer) - About Ken Thompson Ken is an American pioneer of computer science, and helped create the B programming language (which is now replaced by the C programming language). - He created UNIX alongside Kerighan and Ritchie, and helped create the Plan 9 operating systems distributed by Bell Labs.

#9 Rasmus Lerdorf
		Rasmus Lerdorf’s Websites Bio – http://lerdorf.com/bio.php Toys – http://toys.lerdorf.com PHP – http://www.php.net Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf - About Rasmus Lerdorf Rasmus Lerdorf is the creator of PHP. He authorised the first 2 versions of PHP, and then contributed in the development of later versions of PHP. - PHP runs over 34% of websites online today, so Rasmus created something purely amazing.

#10 Jason Fried
		Jason Fried’s Websites 37 Signals – http://www.37signals.com Twitter – http://twitter.com/jasonfried - About Jason Fried Jason Fried is the founder of 37 signals. 37 Signals have some amazing web apps out that thousands of people use daily. The 37 signals blog is very popular, and their job board gets hundreds of jobs posted. - Did I forget to mention they also invented ruby on rails?

#11 James Gosling
		James Gosling’s Websites James Gosling – http://www.jamesgosling.com Apple Science Profile – http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/gosling/ Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling - About James Gosling James A. Gosling, is a famous software developer, best known as the father of the Java programming language. - He also has a personal website and a page over at the Apple Science website.

#12 Brendan Eich
		Brendan Eich’s Websites Twitter – http://twitter.com/brendaneich Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich - About Brendan Eich Brendan Eich is a computer programmer and creator of the JavaScript programming language. - He is the Chief Technology Officer at the Mozilla Corporation.

#13 Carl Sassenrath
		Carl Sassenrath’s Websites Official Site – http://www.sassenrath.com Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath - About Carl Sassenrath Carl Sassenrath is an architect of operating systems and computer languages. - He brought multitasking to personal computers in 1985 with the creation of the Amiga Computer operating system kernel, and he is currently the designer of the REBOL computer language as well as the CTO of REBOL Technologies.

#14 Bjarne Stroustrup
		Bjarne Stroustrup’s Websites ATT Research – http://www.research.att.com/~bs/ Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjarne_Stroustrup - About Bjarne Stroustrup Bjarne Stroustrup is a computer scientist most notable for developing the C++ programming language. - He is currently Professor and holder of the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science at the Texas A&M University.

#15 Bram Cohen
		Bram Cohen’s Websites Bram Cohen – http://bramcohen.com Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen - About Bram Cohen Bram Cohen is an American computer programmer, best known as the author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol. - He also created the first file sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent.

#16 Alan Cooper
		Alan Cooper’s Websites Cooper – http://www.cooper.com/alan/father_of_vb.html Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cooper - About Alan Cooper Cooper is sometimes called “the father of Visual Basic”, although much of work on Visual Basic was done by Microsoft’s internal development group. - Cooper was the leading force behind VB 1.0 and pioneered the use of an IDE to create a GUI via wrapped calls to system routines in the API.

#17 Larry Wall
		Larry Wall’s Websites Perl – http://www.perl.org Wall – http://www.wall.org/~larry/ Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall - About Larry Wall Larry Wall s a programmer and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987. - He is the co-author of Programming Perl, which is the definitive resource for Perl programmers.

#18 Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
		Edsger Wybe Dijkstra’s Websites Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_Dijkstra Dijkstra’s Algorithm – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm - About Edsger Wybe Dijkstra Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist. - He received the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 2000.

#19 John Resig
		John Resig’s Websites eJohn – http://ejohn.org jQuery – http://www.jquery.com Twitter – http://twitter.com/jeresig - About John Resig John is the creator of the very popular javascript library jQuery. He also is a javascript programmer, blogger and author. Oh and did i forget to mention he works for Mozilla? - He is currently working on his second book “Secrets of the javascript ninja”.

#20 Guido van Rossum
		Guido van Rossum’s Websites Python – http://python.org/~guido/ Twitter – http://twitter.com/gvanrossum - About Guido van Rossum Guido is the author the the python programming language. He joined google back in 2005, and he loves the fact he gets to spend half the time there on python. - In June 2003, he was the finalist in the category IT Software (Individual) of the World Technology Network Awards.

#21 Douglas Crockford
		Douglas Crockford’s Websites Crockford – http://www.crockford.com Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford - About Douglas Crockford Douglas Crockford is a senior JavaScript Architect at the most popular websites in the world, Yahoo! He is well known for his work in introducing JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). - He has also worked for companies such as Atari, Luciasfilm and Paramount.

#22 Miguel de Icaza
		Miguel de Icaza’s Websites Blog – http://tirania.org/blog/ Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza - About Miguel de Icaza Miguel is a Mexican free software programmer, best known for starting the GNOME and Mono projects. - He came from a family of scientists in which his father was a physicist and his mother a biologist. Miguel started to write free software in 1992.

#23 Jeff Atwood
		Jeff Atwood’s Websites Coding Horror – http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/ Twitter – http://twitter.com/codinghorror - About Jeff Atwood Jeff blogs about coding on CodingHorror. The blog is extremely popular, and has to date over 130,000 RSS Subscribers. - The blog features a very simplistic design, but obviously the content is extremely effective.

#24 Kathy Sierra
		Kathy Sierra’s Websites Twitter – http://twitter.com/kathysierra Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra - About Kathy Sierra Kathy is a programming instructor and game developer. - She co-created the Head first series of books to do with computing.

#25 Scott Hanselman
		Scott Hanselman’s Websites Hanselman – http://www.hanselman.com Twitter – http://twitter.com/shanselman Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Hanselman - About Scott Hanselman Scott is the principal program manager at Microsoft’s developer division. He often speaks about software development at many Microsoft events. - He also publishes a blog and a very popular podcast around the technology lines.

#26 Steven Frank
		Steven Frank’s Websites Panic – http://www.panic.com Steven Frank – http://stevenf.tumblr.com Twitter – http://twitter.com/stevenf - About Steven Frank Steven Frank is the co-founder of the extremely popular mac software company, “Panic”. - Panic make many amazing Mac applications. I would recommend buying more a less every one.

#27 Ben Goodger
		Websites Ben Goodger Blog – http://www.bengoodger.com Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goodger - About Ben Goodger is a former employee of Netscape Communications Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation and former lead developer of the Firefox web browser. - He is currently working for Google Inc., where he leads the Google Chrome project.

#28 Dion Almaer
		Dion Almaer’s Websites Ajaxian – http://ajaxian.com Almaer – http://almaer.com/blog/ Vimeo Profile – http://www.vimeo.com/dion Twitter – http://twitter.com/dalmaer - About Dion Almaer Dion is the co-founder of AjaxIan.com. AjaxIan teaches people about the popular javascript language, Ajax. - There are also many other writers at AjaxIan.com. There are hundreds of articles, and its the ultimate Ajax resource for developers.

#29 Craig Newmark
		Craig Newmark’s Websites Craigslist – http://www.craigslist.org Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Newmark - About Craig Newmark Craig was born in 1952, and is the founder of the popular website Craigslist.com. - Craig developed Craigslist from the ground up, and today is used worldwide by thousands of people. He is an inspiration to all.

#30 John D. Carmack
		John D. Carmack’s Websites Armadillo Aerospace – http://www.armadilloaerospace.com Wikipedia Page – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack - About John D. Carmack John D. Carmack is an American game programmer, and the co-founder of id Software. - Carmack was the lead programmer of the id computer games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and the sequels to Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein.