The Gods of IT

1. 1 Peter Norvig Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI.
2. 2 Alan Kay Inventor of Smalltalk. Coined the term "object-oriented programming".
3. 3 Guy Steele Co-inventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five. Currently working on Fortress.
4. 4 Donald Knuth Author of The Art of Computer Programming and TeX
5. 5 Gerald Jay Sussman Co-creator of Scheme and co-author of The Structure And Interpretation of Computer Programs.
6. 6 John McCarthy Invented Lisp
7. 7 John Carmack Founder of id Software; lead programmer of Doom, Quake, and others.
8. 8 Joe Armstrong Inventor of Erlang
9. 9 Dennis Ritchie Invented C and contributed to development of UNIX
10. 10 Ken Thompson Inventor of UNIX
11. 11 Brian Kernighan The K in AWK and K&R. Author of the original "hello, world" program.
12. 12 Guido van Rossum Invented Python
13. 13 Linus Torvalds Wrote and maintains Linux kernel. Wrote GIT version control system.
14. 14 Steve Wozniak Wrote most of the original Apple II software.
15. 15 Bill Joy Wrote BSD TCP/IP stack, vi
16. 16 Simon Peyton Jones Co-inventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler.
17. 17 Alan Cox One of Linus Torvalds's main lieutenants. Wrote Linux TCP/IP code.
18. 18 Larry Wall Invented Perl
19. 19 Jamie Zawinski Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker.
20. 20 Theo de Raadt Founder of OpenBSD project. Original author of OpenSSH.
21. 21 Robert Morris Wrote the Internet Worm and co-founded Viaweb with Paul Graham
22. 22 Ward Cunningham Wrote the first Wiki and FIT.
23. 23 Edi Weitz Lisp library hacker extraordinaire. Co-organizer of the European Common Lisp Meetings 2005 and 2006
24. 24 Chuck Moore Invented Forth
25. 25 Tim Sweeney Founder of Epic Games. Wrote the Unreal Engine.
26. 26 Brendan Eich Invented Javascript
27. 27 Fabrice Bellard Wrote QEMU, TinyCC, FFMPEG; Winner of 2001 IOCCC
28. 28 Paul Graham Lisp hacker and author.
29. 29 Yukihiro Matsumoto Invented Ruby
30. 30 Dan Bernstein Wrote djbns and qmail
31. 31 Andrew Tridgell Wrote Samba file server and co-invented rsync algorithm
32. 32 Andy Gavin Co-founder of Naughty Dog software. Wrote GOAL which was used to develop Jak and Daxter.
33. 33 Brad Fitzpatrick Wrote LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, Perlbal
34. 34 Andrew Tanenbaum Created Minix, advocate for micro-kernels.
35. 35 Michael Abrash Optimization expert
36. 36 Bram Cohen Wrote BitTorrent
37. 37 Miguel de Icaza Wrote GNOME and Mono
38. 38 Hal Abelson Abelson of Abelson and Sussman. MIT professor.
39. 39 Rob Pike Author of first bitmap windowing system for Unix. Worked on Plan 9. Now works at Google.
40. 40 Richard Stallman Wrote Emacs, gcc, and started the Free Software movement.
41. 41 Douglas Engelbart Invented computer mouse
42. 42 Marvin Minsky Artifical Intelligence researcher
43. 43 Audrey Tang Leader of Pugs project to implement Perl 6 in Haskell
44. 44 Bruce Schneier Security expert. Creator of Twofish block cipher.
45. 45 Philip Greenspun Author of Greenspun's Tenth Law and sometimes instructor at MIT
46. 46 Stephen Wolfram Invented Mathematica
47. 47 James Gosling Invented Java, NeWS windowing system.
48. 48 Erik Naggum Lisp hacker
49. 49 Frances Allen Pioneer in optimizing compilers. First woman to win Turing Award (2006) and first woman IBM fellow.
50. 50 Paul Buchheit Creator of GMail
51. 51 Bjarne Stroustrup Invented C++
52. 52 Justin Frankel Wrote Winamp, NSIS, and Gnutella
53. 53 Anders Hejlsberg Lead architect of C#, Architect of Delphi at Borland. Wrote what became Turbo Pascal
54. 54 Bill Gosper One of the original MIT hackers. Worked on Lisp machines, Maclisp, and Macsyma
55. 55 David Heinemeier Hansson Invented Rails
56. 56 L. Peter Deutsch Author of Ghostscript, Implemented Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1
57. 57 Andy Hertzfeld Key Macintosh developer
58. 58 Whitfield Diffie Discovered principle of public key cryptography
59. 59 Wil Shipley Wrote Delicious Monster. Founded Omni Group
60. 60 Raymond Chen Worked on OS/2, Windows 95, and Direct X
61. 61 Charles Simonyi Invented Hungarian notation. Original author of Microsoft Word. Head of the IP project at Microsoft, now running intentsoft.com
62. 62 Richard Gabriel Lisper and Poet. Currently a Distinguished Engineer at IBM. Chair of OOPSLA 2007.
63. 63 Sergey Brin Founded Google
64. 64 Martin Fowler Chief Scientist at Thoughtworks. Author of Refactoring and many other books.
65. 65 Gregor Kiczales Wrote Common Lisp MOP. Invented Aspect Oriented programming.
66. 66 Dan Ingalls Smalltalk implementor and designer.
67. 67 Matt Dillon FreeBSD hacker, founded DragonFly BSD project
68. 68 Steve Yegge Blogger and Googler
69. 69 Why the lucky stiff Core Ruby developer and free spirit
70. 70 Leslie Lamport Distributed systems researcher and developer of LaTeX
71. 71 Xavier Leroy Primary developer of OCaml. Wrote LinuxThreads threading package used in pre 2.6 Linux kernels
72. 72 Alexander Stepanov Author of the Standard Template Library for C++
73. 73 Marc Andreessen Co-wrote Mosaic. Founded Netscape.
74. 74 Douglas Crockford JSON founder, JavaScript Architect at Yahoo!
75. 75 Larry Page Founded Google
76. 76 Douglas McIlroy Unix toolsmith; invented Unix pipelines
77. 77 Zed Shaw Wrote Mongrel (Rails HTTP server)
78. 78 Bill Atkinson Early Mac developer. Designed and implemented Hypercard
79. 79 David Cutler Architect of VMS and Windows NT
80. 80 Danny Hillis Founder of Thinking Machines
81. 81 Roy Fielding One of the principle authors of HTTP specification. Invented REST. Co-founder of Apache project
82. 82 Olin Shivers Comp Sci professor interested in Scheme and ML. Wrote scsh
83. 83 Aaron Swartz Invented web.py
84. 84 Allison Randal Architect of Parrot virtual machine
85. 85 Josh Bloch Author of Java collections framework. Now at Google.
86. 86 Vinton Cerf Father of TCP/IP
87. 87 Trevor Blackwell Principal at Viaweb. Now founder and CEO of Anybots
88. 88 Mark Pilgrim Wrote Universal Feed Parser. Author of Dive into Python and Dive into Accessibility.
89. 89 Van Jacobson Redesigned TCP/IP flow control algorithms, saving the net from total collapse. Eponymous inventor of Van Jacobson TCP/IP header compression.
90. 90 Bruce Momjian Core PostgreSQL developer
91. 91 Henry Baker One of the founder of Symbolics; comp sci. researcher
92. 92 Brad Cox Invented Objective C
93. 93 Bill Gates Wrote BASIC for Altair
94. 94 Jonathan Rees Designed T dialect of Scheme and co-wrote Scheme 48
95. 95 Bertrand Meyer Invented Eiffel
96. 96 Ivan Sutherland Invented Sketchpad, precursor to modern GUIs
97. 97 Niklaus Wirth Invented Pascal, Modula, Oberon
98. 98 Alex Martelli Co-author of Python Cookbook and Author of Python in a Nutshell
99. 99 Philip Wadler Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. Contributed to design of Java, Haskell, and XQuery.
100. 100 Mark Shuttleworth Founded Thawte and Ubuntu project. Previously a Debian developer
101. 101 Tom Lane Core PostgreSQL developer responsible for optimizer.
102. 102 Richard Hipp Wrote sqlite embedded SQL database
103. 103 Ingo Molnár Linux hacker, author of many Linux perfomance improvements.
104. 104 Bruce Eckel Founding member of ANSI/ISO C++ committee. Author of Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++.
105. 105 Kent Pitman Technical Editor of Common Lisp ANSI standard
106. 106 Richard Greenblatt Main implementor of Maclisp on PDP-6. Co-founded Lisp Machines, Inc.
107. 107 Jeff Rubin According to Richard Gabriel a "code-writing savant".
108. 108 Adrian Holovaty Lead developer of Django
109. 109 Jon Bentley Author of Programming Pearls books.
110. 110 Kent Beck Creator of XP
111. 111 Bram Moolenaar Wrote VIM (Vi IMproved)
112. 112 Tom Duff Invented Duff's device and noted graphics programmer
113. 113 Dave Fox Lisp hacker, directior of Lispworks Ltd.
114. 114 Marco Baringer Common Lisp hacker, author of Uncommon Web
115. 115 Luke Gorrie Lisp and Erlang hacker. Project lead for SLIME.
116. 116 Alain Colmerauer Invented Prolog
117. 117 John Foderaro Original author of Franz's Allegro Common Lisp
118. 118 Don Stewart Haskell hacker
119. 119 Elizabeth Rather Colleague of Chuck Moore and second ever Forth programmer
120. 120 Ka-Ping Yee Python hacker extraordinaire.
121. 121 Jeff Dean Google Fellow in Systems Infrastructure Group. Co-inventor of MapReduce.
122. 122 Tim Peters Python hacker and author of Spambayes
123. 123 Rasmus Lerdorf Invented PHP
124. 124 Alvy Ray Smith Graphics pioneer. Worked at LucasFilm, helped found Pixar.
125. 125 Marshall Kirk McKusick Designed Berkeley Fast File System.
126. 126 Steve Russell One of John McCarthy's grad students. Brought Lisp to life by hand-coding EVAL in assembler. Wrote Spacewar.
127. 127 Damian Conway Perl hacker and three time winner of the Larry Wall award. Wrote Lingua::Romana::Perligata and others.
128. 128 Ola Bini Core JRuby developer
129. 129 Poul-Henning Kamp FreeBSD kernel hacker
130. 130 Ellen Spertus Head of Interdisciplinary Computer Science department at Mills College
131. 131 Wietse Venema Wrote Postfix. Co-wrote Satan and TCT
132. 132 Charles Nutter Principle JRuby developer
133. 133 Jim Hugunin Original author of Iron Python, now at Microsoft working on dynamic languages on the CLR. Co-designer of AspectJ language, lead development through 1.1 release.
134. 134 Roberto Ierusalimschy Invented Lua
135. 135 Edward Feigenbaum Father of Expert Systems
136. 136 Urs Hölzle Researcher behind Sun's HotSpot JVM technology.
137. 137 P.J. Plauger Worked on first commercial C compiler
138. 138 Tom Lord Scheme and C hacker. Wrote GNU Arch
139. 139 Erich Gamma One of the Gang of Four
140. 140 Jarkko Oikarinen Started IRC
141. 141 Mitchell Kapor Founded Lotus
142. 142 Don Hopkins Invented Pie Menus, working on One Laptop Per Child project.
143. 143 Paul Vixie Wrote BIND
144. 144 Michael Feathers XP guru
145. 145 Janus Friis Founder of Joost, Skype, Kazaa
146. 146 John Ousterhout Invented TCL
147. 147 Graham Nelson Invented Inform language used to program interatvive fiction
148. 148 Eric Meijer Architect in SQL server group at Microsoft working on combining functional programming with the CLR and SQL
149. 149 Udi Manber VP of Engineering at Google. Co-author of Glimpse, Agrep, and Harvest search packages.
150. 150 Mark Zuckerberg Founder and CEO of Facebook
151. 151 Scott McKay Lisp and Dylan designer.
152. 152 Keith Packard X Windows hacker, founded X.Org Server project
153. 153 Paul Allen Co-founded Microsoft.
154. 154 Richard Kelsey Co-wrote Scheme 48 and edited R5RS
155. 155 Amy Fowler Core Java Swing developer
156. 156 Butler Lampson Systems pioneer. Worked on Xerox's Alto.
157. 157 Dan Bricklin Wrote Visicalc
158. 158 Nick Bradbury Wrote HomeSite, TopStyle, and FeedDemon
159. 159 Ralph Johnson One of the Gang of Four
160. 160 John Gilmore Contributor to several GNU projects. Co-author of Bootstrap protocol which became DHCP. Founder of EFF, Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus solutions.
161. 161 Carla Schroder Long-time Linux geek.
162. 162 Zack Rusin Qt graphics guru
163. 163 Donald Chamberlin Principle designer of SQL; ACM Intercollegiate Programming Contest judge, 1998-2005
164. 164 Rick Olsen Core Rails developer, wrote Mephisto and Beast
165. 165 Joe Marshall Lisp hacker
166. 166 Gavin King Original author of Hibernate, JBoss Seam
167. 167 Martin Odersky Invented Scala
168. 168 James Duncan Davidson Started Apache Ant and Apache Tomcat projects. Author of Java Servlet API and Java API for XML processing J2EE specifications.
169. 169 Richard Karp Researcher in theory of algorithms
170. 170 Brian Behlendorf Apache organizer
171. 171 Dan Farmer Co-wrote Satan and TCT
172. 172 Roger Hui Implementor of of J language
173. 173 Ray Ozzie Main architect of Lotus Notes. Now Chief Software Architect at Microsoft.
174. 174 Scott Meyers Author of Effective C++, More Effective C++, Effective STL
175. 175 Henry Spencer Wrote Unix regex library later incorporated into Tcl and Perl. Co-wrote C News news server
176. 176 Steve Dekorte Invented Io language.
177. 177 Jim Blinn Graphics Fellow at Microsoft
178. 178 Evan Phoenix Author of Rubinus compiler/virtual machine for Ruby
179. 179 Ray Tomlinson Wrote first networked email system and gave us the @-sign in email addresses.
180. 180 Larry Osterman Longtime Microsoftie
181. 181 Russ Cox Worked on Plan 9. Represented U.S. at 1995 International Olympiad in Informatics
182. 182 Paul 'Rusty' Russell One of Linus Torvald's top deputies. Wrote ipchains and netfilter/iptables packet filtering code
183. 183 Peter Van Roy Contributor to Mozart/Oz programming system. Author of Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming
184. 184 Matt Mackall Wrote Mecurial version control system.
185. 185 Chris Wanstrath Notable Rails programmer
186. 186 Niklas Zennstrom Founder of Joost, Skype, Kazaa
187. 187 David Korn Wrote the Korn shell
188. 188 Avi Bryant Co-founder Dabble DB
189. 189 Barry Boehem Software metrics guru
190. 190 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen Wrote Gnus and Gmane
191. 191 Jacob Kaplan-Moss Django developer. Wrote Tivo apps in Python and now hacking Python on the PSP
192. 192 John Mashey Early Unix hacker
193. 193 Keith Bostic Worked on BSD at Berkeley and one of the original authors of BerkeleyDB
194. 194 Gavin Schmidt Programmer on GISS climate modeling software.
195. 195 Robert Martin Founder and CEO of Object Mentor. C++ and Agile methods expert.
196. 196 Adele Goldberg Smalltalk designer and documenter.
197. 197 Dan Geer Security expert
198. 198 Austin Meyer Author of X-Plane and Space Combat flight simulators
199. 199 Neil Hodgson Wrote Scintilla and SciTE
200. 200 Doug Lea Concurrency expert and systems programmer.
201. 201 Brian Harvey UC Comp Sci professor. Author of Berkeley Logo
202. 202 Paul Haeberli Computer graphics researcher
203. 203 Rob McCool Wrote NCSA HTTPd; drafted Common Gateway Interface specification
204. 204 Radia Perlman Invented spanning-tree protocol
205. 205 Stefan Meyer-Kahlen Author of Shredder chess program
206. 206 Alessandro Rubini Linux kernel hacker
207. 207 Craig McClanahan Original author of Apache Struts
208. 208 Will Crowther Wrote Adventure and the inner packet processing loop of the original internet IMPs
209. 209 Marcus Ranum Security expert and author of Firewall Toolkit and Network Flight Recorder
210. 210 Wouter van Oortmerssen Game programmer and language designer
211. 211 Eric Allman Wrote sendmail
212. 212 Andrew Hunt Co-founder of Pragmatic Programmers
213. 213 Arthur Whitney Invented A+ and K languages and wrote prototype of J language
214. 214 Dave Thomas Co-founder of Pragmatic Programmers
215. 215 Dan Piponi Graphics programmer and theorist.
216. 216 Peter Weinberger The W in AWK
217. 217 Thomas Enebo Principle JRuby developer
218. 218 Richard Helm One of the Gang of Four
219. 219 Bob Scheifler Led the development of X Windows while the X Consortium was at MIT
220. 220 Charles Hedrick Lisp Unix hacker
221. 221 Guillaume Laforge Groovy project lead
222. 222 Ilya Zakharevich Major contributor to perl5 including a major reworking of the regex engine.
223. 223 John Vlissides One of the Gang of Four
224. 224 Dominic Giampaolo Wrote BeOS file system
225. 225 Salvatore Sanfilippo Software developer and security expert
226. 226 Rod Johnson Original author of Spring Framework
227. 227 Mathias Feist Co-author of Fritz chess program.
228. 228 Sam Leffler BSD hacker. Wrote FreeBSD wi-fi drivers
229. 229 Chris Torek BSDI os hacker
230. 230 Mike Karels System architect of BSD 4.3 and 4.4 releases.
231. 231 Jeff Mogul HP Fellow working on networking performance. Contributed to HTTP 1.1 spec
232. 232 Rob Barnaby Worked some on early Logo, wrote Word Star. Also did Stringcomp, an early string processing language.
233. 233 Eric Bina Co-wrote Mosaic.
234. 234 Simon Willison Django developer. Hacker Liason for Yahoo UK
235. 235 Frans Morsch Co-author of Fritz chess program.
236. 236 John Harper Wrote librep and the sawfish window manager
237. 237 Spencer Janssen Wrote xmonad, a tiling window manager implemened in Haskell
238. 238 John Socha Wrote many DOS software packages for Norton Computing
239. 239 Peter Karp Responsible for the development of BioCyc
240. 240 Mark Maybee Worked on ZFS DMU at Sun.
241. 241 Graeme Rocher Grails project lead
242. 242 Dan Sugalski Original architect of Parrot VM
243. 243 Peter Norton Wrote the first version of the Norton Utilities
244. 244 Erik Benson Cheif Janitorial Officer - Robot Coop
245. 245 Mark Fletcher Founder Bloglines, egroups
246. 246 Graham Spencer Co-founder Excite & Jot-Spot
247. 247 Mark Jason Dominus Perl programmer; author of Higher Order Perl
248. 248 Sape Mullender Member of Technical Staff, Lucent Technologies,Bell Labs Innovations, Computing Sciences Research, Murray Hill, New Jersey.
249. 249 Paul Mackerras Samba developer
250. 250 Val Henson Kernel hacker and file systems specialist.
251. 251 Greg Linden Founder Findory & worked at Amazon
252. 252 Dick Wall Co-host of the Java Posse podcast. Works at Google.
253. 253 Spencer Kimball Co-wrote GIMP. Googler.
254. 254 Jeff Bonwick Chief architect of ZFS
255. 255 Peter Mattis Co-wrote GIMP. Googler.
256. 256 Bernie Cosell One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMP's and a master debugger.
257. 257 Shay Bushinsky Co-author of Junior chess program.
258. 258 Dennis Crawley DodgeBall
259. 259 Rainer Joswig Contributes to CL-HTTP
260. 260 Biz Stone Twitter
261. 261 Max Levchin Co-founder Pay Pal & Slide
262. 262 Joel Reymont Open Poker
263. 263 Jon Kleinberg Cornell Comp. Sci. professor.
264. 264 Joel Spolsky FogCreekSoftware
265. 265 Munjal Shah Co-founder Riya
266. 266 Dierk Koenig. Groovy, Grails contributor
267. 267 Peter-Paul Koch Javascript guru. Maintains quirksmode website.
268. 268 Frank Heart Managed the group that built the ARPANET.
269. 269 Amir Ban Co-author of Junior chess program.
270. 270 Watts Humphrey CMM guru.
271. 271 Rusty Bobrow BBNer doing work in computational linguistics, speech recognition, and artificial intelligence.
272. 272 Simon Tatham Author of PuTTY
273. 273 Thomas Knoll Original creator of Photoshop.
274. 274 Eric Swildens Founder Microline Software, Co-founder Speedera Networks
275. 275 Evan Williams Twitter
276. 276 Dan Weinreb Founder of Symbolics. Now at ITA.
277. 277 Robert Thau Early Apache developer. Started Bianca Troll
278. 278 Chrilly Donninger Author of the Hydra chess program.
279. 279 Matthew Ahrens Works on ZFS in kernel group at Sun
280. 280 Michael C. Schatz Author of a number of gene sequencing programs.
281. 281 Alex Russell Created Dojo Javascript library
282. 282 Richard Fateman Computer algebraist. Worked on MacSysma and Maxima
283. 283 Sam Stephenson Created Prototype Javascript library
284. 284 Naval Ravikanth Founder vast.com