Tim Bray's Top Twenty Software People in the World

jg21 writes "Although this reader-compiled list of software development's giants omits pioneers like George Boole, John Louis von Neumann, and the 'Forgotten Father of the Computer' John Vincent Atanasoff - among others - it does a pretty good job of mapping the Code Masters, from Alan Turing who gave us the algorithm, to Klaus Knopper the one-man band behind Knoppix. They're mostly here - the inventors of C, C++, C#, Java, and Python; example. There are a couple of programmers who have snuck in more for their business acumen than their programming talent, like the former Powersoft/Sybase CEO Mitchell Kertzman but otherwise the 40 nominees seem pretty 'pure' and the overall idea is to narrow the list down to the Top Twenty Software People in the World - a phrase invented by Tim Bray, who blogged that Adam Bosworth would be among them. Be careful what you wish for when blogging - looks like Bray's about to find out who the community thinks the the 19 others are."

Re:Ada Lovelace?

[julesh]

Yet they, struggling to find a token woman for their list, come up with some venture capitalist that nobody has ever heard of outside of Silly Valley?

Not even Grace Hopper [wikipedia.org], developer of the first compiled high level programming language? Sheesh.

Al Khowarizmi

[Anonymous Coward]

820 A.D. whose name is where the English word "algorithm" originates. Not exactly a 'giant' but a founder.

softwarehistory.org has a much better list

[Jrod5000 at RPI]

This list purposely doesn't include technology-du-jour and instead focuses on those whose ideas have had long-standing impact. http://www.softwarehistory.org/history/important_p eople.html [softwarehistory.org] Reading about all the exciting things these people have accomplished is really motivating.

Wikipedia's List of Programmers

[EqualSlash]

[[Category:Programmers]] [wikipedia.org]

Re:Knuth

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Arguably Bill did more for personal computers than most anyone else out there.

Very arguably. Personally I can't see a damn thing Gates has done for PC's (in the generic sense) -- Microsoft's entire strategy, from the very beginning, has been to hijack existing markets rather than pioneering new ones.

A lot of people on /. may be too young to remember this, but there used to be lots of different choices for PC's -- and by "different" I mean genuinely different, not just the rather trivial difference between companies that build "Made for Microsoft Windows(tm)" boxes with "Intel Inside(r)". And in those days, Microsoft was just some company that wrote a lousy OS for IBM.

And then, a while later, there were lots of choices among word processors, spreadsheets, etc., and Microsoft's products were considered inferior knockoffs. But they were the people who wrote that lousy OS for IBM, so the suits bought their products, and ... well, you probably know the rest.

The Net, and especially the Web, were the killer app for PC's, what finally made them as much a part of Joe Sixpack's home as a refrigerator and a TV. Once again, Microsoft had nothing to do with the development -- but they did have enough money to jump in with both feet once the market was established. No innovation, no research, nothing of value to anyone except Microsoft itself.

We are finally, slowly, thanks to Apple's mild resurgence and (probably more important in the long run) the growth of Linux, getting to the point where there is real competition in the PC world. But Bill G. has been its enemy at every turn.

Moronic

[tbray]

This idea is moronic, the list is woefully incomplete, I had nothing to with it, and they shouldn't be using my name like that.

Don't feel bad...

[dpilot]

They missed Randy Waterhouse, too. After all, he invented one of the early computers, complete with accoustic delay lines.

Re:Knuth

[MyLongNickName]

Bull. Microsoft forced a lot of standardization into the way that software behaved. I remember back in the 80's I had one word processor where F1 was save the document. I had another spreadsheet where F1 was quit without asking if you want to save or not. I lost a lot of work on spreadsheets.

Microsoft did a lot for computing back in the 80's. They still do a lot of good today (gasp... get out the -1 mods). Granted they also do harm as well (more today than years back).

To say Bill Gates did nothing or little for computing is a joke,

Re:Female hackers

[kaalamaadan]

A "computer" was almost always a woman. Talented mathematical women were employed in longh calculations in scientific establishments, and the common term for these people was "computer".

Even Turing's famous "On Computable Numbers with Applications to the Entscheidungsproblem" refers to "computers" with "she" and "her".