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 should 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-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
• 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
• Jonathan Blow – video game designer and programmer of Braid and The Witness
• 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 APL\360
• 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 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
• Mike Cowlishaw – REXX and NetRexx, LEXX editor, image processing, decimal arithmetic packages
• Alan Cox – co-developer of Linux kernel
• Brad Cox – Objective-C
• Mark Crispin – creator of IMAP, author of UW-IMAP, one of reference implementations of IMAP4
• William Crowther – Colossal Cave Adventure
• Ward Cunningham – creator of Wiki concept
• Dave Cutler – architect of VMS, Windows NT

D

• Ole-Johan Dahl – co-creator of SIMULA
• Ryan Dahl – creator of Node.js
• 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

• Scott Fahlman - creator of the smiley face emoticon :-)
• 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
• Martin Fowler – creator of Dependency Injection pattern of software engineering, a form of Inversion of control
• Brian Fox – creator of Bash, Readline, GNU Finger, Meta-HTML

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
• Margaret Hamilton – Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the Apollo space program
• David Heinemeier Hansson – created the Ruby on Rails framework for developing web applications
• 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
• 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
• David Albert Huffman – created the Huffman Code compression algorithm
• 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
• Stephen C. Johnson – yacc
• Lynne Jolitz – 386BSD
• William Jolitz – 386BSD
• 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 – 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-creator of BASIC
• 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
• Leslie Lamport – LaTeX
• Butler Lampson – QED original co-author
• Tom Lane – primary author of libjpeg, major developer of PostgreSQL
• Sam Lantinga – creator of SDL
• Dick Lathwell – co-developer of APL\360
• 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
• Hans Peter Luhn – hash-coding, linked list, searching and sorting binary tree

M

• Khaled Mardam-Bey – creator 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 and Railroad Tycoon, co-founded Microprose
• 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
• Petr Mitrichev – competitive programmer
• 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 APL\360, 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
• Klara Dan von Neumann – principal programmer for the MANIAC I
• Phiwa Nkambule – Co-founder of Riovic, founder of Cybatar
• Peter Norton – programmer of 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
• 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
• 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
• Aaron Swartz – software developer, writer, Internet activist
• 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 current maintainer of Slackware Linux Distribution

W

• John Walker – co-founder of Autodesk
• Larry Wall – Warp (1980s space-war game), rn, patch, Perl
• Bob Wallace – author PC-Write word processor; considered a co-creator of shareware
• John Warnock – creator of PostScript
• Robert Watson – FreeBSD network stack parallelism, TrustedBSD project and OpenBSM
• Pei-Yuan Wei – author of Viola, one of the 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; popular teacher and conference speaker
• Joseph Weizenbaum – creator of ELIZA
• 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 of 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

• Matei Zaharia – creator of Apache Spark
• Jamie Zawinski – Lucid Emacs, Netscape, Mozilla, XScreenSaver
• Philip Zimmermann – creator of encryption software PGP, the ZRTP protocol, and Zfone
• Mark Zuckerberg – creator of Facebook

See also

• Notable game programmers in Game programmer
• List of pioneers in computer science
• List of computer scientists
• List of programming language researchers
• List of members of the National Academy of Sciences (computer and information sciences)
• List of computing people
• List of important publications in computer science
• List of Russian programmers

References