This is a list of programmers notable for their contributions to software, either as original author or architect, or for later additions. All entries must already have associated articles.

A

Michael Abrash Michael Abrash is a programmer and technical writer specializing in code optimization and 80x86 assembly language. He wrote the 1990 book ''Zen of Assembly Language Volume 1: Knowledge'' and a monthly column in '' Dr. Dobb's Journal'' in the ea ...

–

program optimization In computer science, program optimization, code optimization, or software optimization, is the process of modifying a software system to make some aspect of it work more efficiently or use fewer resources. In general, a computer program may be o ...

and

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was intr ...

assembly language *

Scott Adams Scott Raymond Adams (born June 8, 1957) is an American author and cartoonist. He is the creator of the syndicated '' Dilbert'' comic strip, and the author of several nonfiction works of satire, commentary, and business. ''Dilbert'' gained natio ...

– series of text adventures beginning in the late 1970s *

Tarn Adams Tarn Adams (born April 17, 1978) is an American computer game programmer, best known for his work on ''Dwarf Fortress.'' He has been working on the game since 2002 together with his older brother Zach. He learned programming in his childhood, an ...

–

Dwarf Fortress ''Dwarf Fortress'' (officially called ''Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress'') is a construction and management simulation and roguelike indie video game created by Bay 12 Games. Available as freeware and in development sin ...

Leonard Adleman Leonard Adleman (born December 31, 1945) is an American computer scientist. He is one of the creators of the RSA encryption algorithm, for which he received the 2002 Turing Award, often called the Nobel prize of Computer science. He is also kno ...

– cocreated RSA algorithm (being the ''A'' in that name), coined the term ''computer virus'' *

Alfred Aho Alfred Vaino Aho (born August 9, 1941) is a Canadian computer scientist best known for his work on programming languages, compilers, and related algorithms, and his textbooks on the art and science of computer programming. Aho was elected into ...

– cocreated

AWK AWK (''awk'') is a domain-specific language designed for text processing and typically used as a data extraction and reporting tool. Like sed and grep, it is a filter, and is a standard feature of most Unix-like operating systems. The AWK lang ...

(being the ''A'' in that name), and main author of famous Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (Dragon book) *

Andrei Alexandrescu Andrei Alexandrescu (born 1969) is a Romanian-American C++ and D language programmer and author. He is particularly known for his pioneering work on policy-based design implemented via template metaprogramming. These ideas are articulated ...

– author, expert on languages

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

, D *

Paul Allen Paul Gardner Allen (January 21, 1953 – October 15, 2018) was an American business magnate, computer programmer, researcher, investor, and philanthropist. He co-founded Microsoft Corporation with childhood friend Bill Gates in 1975, which ...

–

Altair BASIC Altair BASIC is a discontinued interpreter for the BASIC programming language that ran on the MITS Altair 8800 and subsequent S-100 bus computers. It was Microsoft's first product (as Micro-Soft), distributed by MITS under a contract. Altair BASI ...

Applesoft BASIC Applesoft BASIC is a dialect of Microsoft BASIC, developed by Marc McDonald and Ric Weiland, supplied with the Apple II series of computers. It supersedes Integer BASIC and is the BASIC in ROM in all Apple II series computers after the origina ...

, cofounded

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

Eric Allman Eric Paul Allman (born September 2, 1955) is an American computer programmer who developed sendmail and its precursor delivermail in the late 1970s and early 1980s at UC Berkeley. In 1998, Allman and Greg Olson co-founded the company Sendmail, I ...

–

sendmail Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility that supports many kinds of mail-transfer and delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) used for email transport over the Internet. A descendant of the ...

syslog In computing, syslog is a standard for message logging. It allows separation of the software that generates messages, the system that stores them, and the software that reports and analyzes them. Each message is labeled with a facility code, i ...

* Marc Andreessen – cocreated

Mosaic A mosaic is a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone, glass or ceramic, held in place by plaster/mortar, and covering a surface. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration, and were particularly pop ...

, cofounded Netscape *

Jeremy Ashkenas Jeremy Ashkenas is a computer programmer known for the creation and co-creation of the CoffeeScript and LiveScript (programming language), LiveScript programming languages respectively, the Backbone.js JavaScript Software framework, framework and ...

–

CoffeeScript CoffeeScript is a programming language that compiles to JavaScript. It adds syntactic sugar inspired by Ruby, Python, and Haskell in an effort to enhance JavaScript's brevity and readability. Specific additional features include list comprehe ...

programming language and Backbone.js *

Bill Atkinson Bill Atkinson (born March 17, 1951) is an American computer engineer and photographer. Atkinson worked at Apple Computer from 1978 to 1990. Atkinson was the principal designer and developer of the graphical user interface (GUI) of the Apple ...

–

QuickDraw A quickdraw (also known as an extender) is a piece of climbing equipment used by rock and ice climbers to allow the climbing rope to run freely through protection such as a bolt anchors or other traditional gear while leading. A quickdr ...

HyperCard HyperCard is a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard combines a flat-file database with a graphical, f ...

B

Roland Carl Backhouse Roland Carl Backhouse (born 18 August 1948) is a British computer scientist and mathematician. , he is Emeritus Professor of Computing Science at the University of Nottingham. Early life and education Backhouse was born and raised in the Thorn ...

–

computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. Computer programs are one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. A computer program ...

construction,

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...

ic problem solving,

ALGOL ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ...

John Backus John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backu ...

– Fortran, BNF * Lars Bak –

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized h ...

specialist *

Richard Bartle Richard Allan Bartle FBCS FRSA (born 10 January 1960) is a British writer, professor and game researcher in the massively multiplayer online game industry. He co-created ''MUD1'' (the first MUD) in 1978, and is the author of the 2003 book ''De ...

– MUD, with

Roy Trubshaw ''Multi-User Dungeon'', or ''MUD'' (referred to as ''MUD1'', to distinguish it from its successor, ''MUD2'', and the MUD genre in general), is the first MUD. History MUD was created in 1978 by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at the Unive ...

, created MUDs *

Friedrich L. Bauer Friedrich Ludwig "Fritz" Bauer (10 June 1924 – 26 March 2015) was a German pioneer of computer science and professor at the Technical University of Munich. Life Bauer earned his Abitur in 1942 and served in the Wehrmacht during World War ...

– Stack (data structure), ''Sequential Formula Translation'',

software engineering Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...

Bauer–Fike theorem In mathematics, the Bauer–Fike theorem is a standard result in the perturbation theory of the eigenvalue of a complex-valued diagonalizable matrix. In its substance, it states an absolute upper bound for the deviation of one perturbed matrix eig ...

Kent Beck Kent Beck (born 1961) is an American software engineer and the creator of extreme programming, a software development methodology that eschews rigid formal specification for a collaborative and iterative design process. Beck was one of the 17 ...

– created

Extreme programming Extreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. As a type of agile software development,"Human Centred Technology Workshop 2006 ", 2006, P ...

, cocreated

JUnit JUnit is a unit testing framework for the Java programming language. JUnit has been important in the development of test-driven development, and is one of a family of unit testing frameworks which is collectively known as xUnit that originated ...

* Donald Becker –

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1 ...

drivers,

Beowulf cluster A Beowulf cluster is a computer cluster of what are normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small local area network with libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them. The result is a hi ...

ing *

Brian Behlendorf Brian Behlendorf (born March 30, 1973) is an American technologist, executive, computer programmer and leading figure in the open-source software movement. He was a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software ...

– Apache HTTP Server * Doug Bell – '' Dungeon Master'' series of

video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This fee ...

s *

Fabrice Bellard Fabrice Bellard (; born 1972) is a French computer programmer known for writing FFmpeg, QEMU, and the Tiny C Compiler. He developed Bellard's formula for calculating single digits of pi. In 2012, Bellard co-founded Amarisoft, a telecommunicatio ...

– created

FFmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of vid ...

open codec library,

QEMU QEMU is a free and open-source emulator (Quick EMUlator). It emulates the machine's central processing unit, processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it t ...

virtualization tools * Tim Berners-Lee – invented

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

* Daniel J. Bernstein –

djbdns The djbdns software package is a DNS implementation. It was created by Daniel J. Bernstein in response to his frustrations with repeated security holes in the widely used BIND DNS software. As a challenge, Bernstein offered a $1000 prize for th ...

qmail qmail is a mail transfer agent (MTA) that runs on Unix. It was written, starting December 1995, by Daniel J. Bernstein as a more secure replacement for the popular Sendmail program. Originally license-free software, qmail's source code ...

Eric Bina Eric J. Bina (born October 1964) is an American software programmer who is the co-creator of Mosaic and the co-founder of Netscape. In 1993, Bina along with Marc Andreessen authored the first version of Mosaic while working as a programmer at Nat ...

– cocreated

Mosaic web browser NCSA Mosaic is a discontinued web browser, one of the first to be widely available. It was instrumental in popularizing the World Wide Web and the general Internet by integrating multimedia such as text and graphics. It was named for its support ...

Marc Blank Marc Blank is an American game developer and software engineer. He is best known as part of the team that created one of the first commercially successful text adventure computer games, ''Zork''. Career Blank first encountered Don Woods and Will ...

– cocreated ''

Zork ''Zork'' is a text-based adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded a ...

'' *

Joshua Bloch Joshua J. Bloch (born August 28, 1961) is an American software engineer and a technology author, formerly employed at Sun Microsystems and Google. He led the design and implementation of numerous Java platform features, including the Java Collect ...

– core Java language designer, lead the

Java collections framework The Java collections framework is a set of classes and interfaces that implement commonly reusable collection data structures. Although referred to as a framework, it works in a manner of a library. The collections framework provides both interf ...

project *

Jonathan Blow Jonathan Blow (born 1971) is an American video game designer and programmer. He is best known for his work on the independent video games '' Braid'' (2008) and '' The Witness'' (2016). Born in California, Blow developed a passion for game prog ...

– video games '' Braid'' and '' The Witness'' * Susan G. Bond – cocreated

ALGOL 68-R ALGOL 68-R was the first implementation of the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 68. In December 1968, the report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 68 was published. On 20–24 July 1970 a working conference was arranged by the International Federation ...

Grady Booch Grady Booch (born February 27, 1955) is an American software engineer, best known for developing the Unified Modeling Language (UML) with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh. He is recognized internationally for his innovative work in software archi ...

– cocreated

Unified Modeling Language The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose, developmental modeling language in the field of software engineering that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. The creation of UML was originally m ...

* Bert Bos – authored Argo web browser, co-authored Cascading Style Sheets * Stephen R. Bourne – cocreated

ALGOL 68C ALGOL 68C is an imperative computer programming language, a dialect of ALGOL 68, that was developed by Stephen R. Bourne and Michael Guy to program the Cambridge Algebra System (CAMAL). The initial compiler was written in the Princeton Syntax ...

, created 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 Andrew Braybrook (born 1960) is a software engineer and former game programmer. He created video games such as '' Paradroid'', '' Gribbly's Day Out'', '' Fire and Ice'', ''Uridium'' and '' Morpheus''. He also programmed the Commodore Amiga and ...

– video games ''

Paradroid ''Paradroid'' is a Commodore 64 computer game written by Andrew Braybrook and published by Hewson Consultants in 1985. It is a shoot 'em up with puzzle elements and was critically praised at release. The objective is to clear a fleet of spaceships ...

'' and '' Uridium'' * Larry Breed – implementation of Iverson Notation (APL), co-developed APL\360,

Scientific Time Sharing Corporation Scientific Time Sharing Corporation (STSC) was a pioneering timesharing and consulting service company which offered APL from its datacenter in Bethesda, MD to users in the United States and Europe. History Scientific Time Sharing Corporation ( ...

cofounder *

Jack Elton Bresenham Jack Elton Bresenham (born 11 October 1937, Clovis, New Mexico, US) is a former professor of computer science. Biography Bresenham retired from 27 years of service at IBM as a Senior Technical Staff Member in 1987. He taught for 16 years at Wi ...

– created

Bresenham's line algorithm Bresenham's line algorithm is a line drawing algorithm that determines the points of an ''n''-dimensional raster that should be selected in order to form a close approximation to a straight line between two points. It is commonly used to draw li ...

Dan Bricklin Daniel Singer Bricklin (born July 16, 1951) is an American businessman and engineer who is the co-creator, with Bob Frankston, of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program. He also founded Software Garden, Inc., of which he is currently president, and T ...

– cocreated

VisiCalc VisiCalc (for "visible calculator") is the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers, originally released for Apple II by VisiCorp on 17 October 1979. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hob ...

, the first personal

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in c ...

program *

Walter Bright Walter G. Bright is an American computer programmer who created the D programming language, the Zortech C++ compiler, and the ''Empire'' computer game. Early life and education Bright is the son of the United States Air Force pilot Charles D. ...

–

Digital Mars Digital Mars is a small American software company owned by Walter Bright and based in Vienna, Virginia, that makes C, C++ and D compilers, and associated utilities such as an integrated development environment (IDE) for Windows and DOS, which ...

, First C++ compiler, authored

D (programming language) D, also known as dlang, is a multi-paradigm system programming language created by Walter Bright at Digital Mars and released in 2001. Andrei Alexandrescu joined the design and development effort in 2007. Though it originated as a re-engine ...

Sergey Brin Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (russian: link=no, Сергей Михайлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist, and internet entrepreneur, who co-founded Google with Larry Page. Brin was th ...

– cofounded

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

Inc. *

Per Brinch Hansen Per Brinch Hansen (13 November 1938 – 31 July 2007) was a Danish-American computer scientist known for his work in operating systems, concurrent programming and parallel and distributed computing. Biography Early life and education Per B ...

(surname "Brinch Hansen") –

RC 4000 multiprogramming system The RC 4000 Multiprogramming System (also termed Monitor or RC 4000 depending on reference) is a discontinued operating system developed for the RC 4000 minicomputer in 1969. For clarity, this article mostly uses the term Monitor. Over ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

kernels Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learnin ...

microkernel In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, ...

s, monitors,

concurrent programming Concurrent means happening at the same time. Concurrency, concurrent, or concurrence may refer to: Law * Concurrence, in jurisprudence, the need to prove both ''actus reus'' and ''mens rea'' * Concurring opinion (also called a "concurrence"), ...

Concurrent Pascal Concurrent Pascal is a programming language designed by Per Brinch Hansen for writing concurrent computing programs such as operating systems and real-time computing monitoring systems on shared memory computers. A separate language, ''Sequenti ...

distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...

& processes, parallel computing * Richard Brodie –

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor, word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other pla ...

Andries Brouwer Andries Evert Brouwer (born 1951) is a Dutch mathematician and computer programmer, Professor Emeritus at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). He is known as the creator of the greatly expanded 1984 to 1985 versions of the roguelike compute ...

– ''

Hack Hack may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Games * ''Hack'' (Unix video game), a 1984 roguelike video game * ''.hack'' (video game series), a series of video games by the multimedia franchise ''.hack'' Music * ''Hack'' (album), a 199 ...

'', former maintainer of

man page A man page (short for manual page) is a form of software documentation usually found on a Unix or Unix-like operating system. Topics covered include computer programs (including library and system calls), formal standards and conventions, and e ...

r, Linux kernel hacker *

Danielle Bunten Berry Danielle Bunten Berry (February 19, 1949 – July 3, 1998), formerly known as Dan Bunten, was an American game designer and programmer, known for the 1983 game ''M.U.L.E.'', one of the first influential multiplayer video games, and 1984's '' T ...

(Dani Bunten) – ''

M.U.L.E. ''M.U.L.E.'' is a 1983 multiplayer video game written for the Atari 8-bit family of home computers by Ozark Softscape. Designer Danielle Bunten Berry (credited as Dan Bunten) took advantage of the four joystick ports of the Atari 400 and 800 to a ...

'', multiplayer video game and other noted video games *

Dries Buytaert Dries Buytaert (born 19 November 1978)Curriculum Vitae
is ...

– created Drupal

C

* Steve Capps – cocreated

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...

and Newton * John Carmack –

first-person shooter First-person shooter (FPS) is a sub-genre of shooter video games centered on gun and other weapon-based combat in a first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action through the eyes of the protagonist and controlling the p ...

s ''

Doom Doom is another name for damnation. Doom may also refer to: People * Doom (professional wrestling), the tag team of Ron Simmons and Butch Reed * Daniel Doom (born 1934), Belgian cyclist * Debbie Doom (born 1963), American softball pitcher * ...

'', '' Quake'' *

Vint Cerf Vinton Gray Cerf (; born June 23, 1943) is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of " the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Bob Kahn. He has received honorary degrees and awards that include ...

–

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

, NCP *

Ward Christensen Ward Christensen (born 1945 in West Bend, Wisconsin, United States) is the co-founder of the CBBS bulletin board, the first bulletin board system (BBS) ever brought online. Christensen, along with partner Randy Suess, members of the Chicago Area ...

– wrote the first BBS (Bulletin Board System) system CBBS *

Edgar F. Codd Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd (19 August 1923 – 18 April 2003) was an English computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases and relational databa ...

– principal architect of relational model *

Bram Cohen Bram Cohen is an American computer programmer, best known as the author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol in 2001, as well as the first file sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent. He is also the co-founder of ...

– BitTorrent protocol design and implementation * Alain Colmerauer –

Prolog Prolog is a logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is intended primarily ...

* Richard W. Conway – compilers for CORC, CUPL, and

PL/C PL/C is an instructional dialect of the programming language PL/I, developed at the Department of Computer Science of Cornell University in the early 1970s in an effort headed by Professor Richard W. Conway and graduate student Thomas R. Wilcox ...

; XCELL Factory Modelling System * Alan Cooper –

Visual Basic Visual Basic is a name for a family of programming languages from Microsoft. It may refer to: * Visual Basic .NET (now simply referred to as "Visual Basic"), the current version of Visual Basic launched in 2002 which runs on .NET * Visual Basic ( ...

* Mike Cowlishaw – REXX and NetRexx, LEXX editor, image processing, decimal arithmetic packages * Alan Cox – co-developed

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learn ...

Brad Cox Brad J. Cox (May 2, 1944 – January 2, 2021) was an American computer scientist who was known mostly for creating the Objective-C programming language with his business partner Tom Love and for his work in software engineering (specifically ...

–

Objective-C Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its NeXT ...

Mark Crispin Mark Reed Crispin (July 19, 1956 in Camden, New Jersey – December 28, 2012 in Poulsbo, Washington) is best known as the father of the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), having invented it in 1985 during his time at the Stanford Knowle ...

– created

IMAP In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by . IMAP was designed with the goal of per ...

, authored UW-IMAP, one of reference implementations of IMAP4 * William Crowther – ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' * Ward Cunningham – created

Wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

concept *

Dave Cutler David Neil Cutler Sr. (born March 13, 1942) is an American software engineer. He developed several computer operating systems, namely Microsoft's Windows NT, and Digital Equipment Corporation's RSX-11M, VAXELN, and VMS. Personal history Cu ...

– architected

RSX-11M RSX-11 is a discontinued family of multi-user real-time operating systems for PDP-11 computers created by Digital Equipment Corporation. In widespread use through the late 1970s and early 1980s, RSX-11 was influential in the development of later ...

, OpenVMS,

VAXELN VAXELN (typically pronounced "VAX-elan") is a discontinued real-time operating system for the VAX family of computers produced by the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) of Maynard, Massachusetts. As with RSX-11 and VMS, Dave Cutler was the ...

DEC MICA MICA was the codename of the operating system developed for the DEC PRISM architecture. MICA was designed by a team at Digital Equipment Corporation led by Dave Cutler. MICA's design was driven by Digital's need to provide a migration path to P ...

Windows NT Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released on July 27, 1993. It is a processor-independent, multiprocessing and multi-user operating system. The first version of Win ...

D

Ole-Johan Dahl Ole-Johan Dahl (12 October 1931 – 29 June 2002) was a Norwegian computer scientist. Dahl was a professor of computer science at the University of Oslo and is considered to be one of the fathers of Simula and object-oriented programming along w ...

– cocreated Simula,

object-oriented programming Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of ...

Ryan Dahl Ryan Dahl (born 1981) is an American software engineer who is best known for creating the Node.js JavaScript runtime as well as the Deno JavaScript/TypeScript runtime. Biography Dahl grew up in San Diego, California. His mother bought him an ...

– created

Node.js Node.js is an open-source server environment. Node.js is cross-platform and runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine and executes JavaScript code o ...

* James Duncan Davidson – created

Tomcat Tomcat may refer to: Animals * A sexually mature male cat * Paederus, known as in Indonesia Science and technology * Apache Tomcat, an implementation of Java web-server technologies * Beretta 3032 Tomcat, a pistol * Grumman F-14 Tomcat, a f ...

, now part of Jakarta Project * Terry A. Davis – developer of

TempleOS TempleOS (formerly J Operating System, LoseThos, and SparrowOS) is a biblical-themed lightweight operating system (OS) designed to be the Third Temple prophesied in the Bible. It was created by American programmer Terry A. Davis, who develope ...

* Jeff Dean –

Spanner A wrench or spanner is a tool used to provide grip and mechanical advantage in applying torque to turn objects—usually rotary fasteners, such as nuts and bolts—or keep them from turning. In the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zeala ...

Bigtable Bigtable is a fully managed wide-column and key-value NoSQL database service for large analytical and operational workloads as part of the Google Cloud portfolio. History Bigtable development began in 2004.. It is now used by a number of Googl ...

MapReduce MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating big data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster. A MapReduce program is composed of a ''map'' procedure, which performs filtering ...

L. Peter Deutsch L Peter Deutsch (born Laurence Peter Deutsch on August 7, 1946, in Boston, Massachusetts) is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and Portable Document Format, PDF interpreter. Deutsch's othe ...

–

Ghostscript Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization or rendering of such page description language file ...

Assembler Assembler may refer to: Arts and media * Nobukazu Takemura, avant-garde electronic musician, stage name Assembler * Assemblers, a fictional race in the ''Star Wars'' universe * Assemblers, an alternative name of the superhero group Champions of ...

for

PDP-1 The PDP-1 (''Programmed Data Processor-1'') is the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1959. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at Massachusett ...

, XDS-940 timesharing system, QED original co-author * Robert Dewar – IFIP WG 2.1 member, chairperson,

ALGOL 68 ALGOL 68 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1968'') is an imperative programming language that was conceived as a successor to the ALGOL 60 programming language, designed with the goal of a much wider scope of application and more rigorously d ...

; GNAT, AdaCore cofounder, president, CEO *Edsger W. Dijkstra – contributions to

, Dijkstra's algorithm, ''Go To Statement Considered Harmful'', IFIP WG 2.1 member *Matt Dillon (computer scientist), Matt Dillon – programmed various software including DICE and DragonflyBSD *Jack Dorsey – created Twitter *Martin Dougiamas – creator and lead developed Moodle *Adam Dunkels – authored Contiki operating system, the lwIP and uIP (micro IP), uIP embedded TCP/IP stacks, invented protothreads

E

*Les Earnest – authored Finger protocol, finger program *Alan Edelman – Edelman's Law, stochastic operator, Interactive Supercomputing, Julia (programming language) cocreator, high performance computing, numerical computing *Brendan Eich – created JavaScript *Larry Ellison – cocreated Oracle Database, cofounded Oracle Corporation *Andrey Ershov – languages ''ALPHA'', ''Rapira''; first Soviet time-sharing system ''AIST-0'', electronic publishing system ''RUBIN'', multiprocessing workstation ''MRAMOR'', IFIP WG 2.1 member, ''Aesthetics and the Human Factor in Programming'' *Marc Ewing – created Red Hat Linux

F

*Scott Fahlman – created smiley face emoticon :-) *Dan Farmer – created COPS (software), COPS and Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN) Security Scanners *Steve Fawkner – created ''Warlords (game series), Warlords'' and ''Puzzle Quest'' *Stuart Feldman – created make (software), make, authored Fortran 77 compiler, part of original group that created Unix *David Filo – cocreated Yahoo! *Brad Fitzpatrick – created memcached, Livejournal and OpenID *Andrew Fluegelman – author PC-Talk communications software; considered a cocreated shareware *Mahmoud Samir Fayed – created PWCT and Ring (programming language), Ring *Martin Fowler (software engineer), Martin Fowler – created the dependency injection pattern of software engineering, a form of inversion of control *Brian Fox (computer programmer), Brian Fox – created Bash (Unix shell), Bash, Readline, GNU Finger protocol, Finger

G

*Elon Gasper – cofounded Bright Star Technology, patented realistic facial movements for in-game speech; HyperAnimator, Alphabet Blocks, etc. *Bill Gates –

, cofounded

*Nick Gerakines – author, contributor to open-source Erlang (programming language), Erlang projects *Jim Gettys – X Window System, HTTP/1.1, One Laptop per Child, Bufferbloat *Steve Gibson (computer programmer), Steve Gibson – created SpinRite *John Gilmore (activist), John Gilmore – GNU Debugger (GDB) *Adele Goldberg (computer scientist), Adele Goldberg – cocreated Smalltalk *Robert Griesemer – cocreated Go_(programming_language), Go *Ryan C. Gordon (a.k.a. Icculus) – Loki Games, Lokigames, ioquake3 *James Gosling – Java (programming language), 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) *Paul Graham (programmer), Paul Graham – Yahoo! Store, On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp *John Graham-Cumming – authored POPFile, a Naive Bayes spam filtering, Bayesian filter-based e-mail classifier *David Gries – The book ''The Science of Programming'', Interference freedom, Member Emeritus, IFIP Working Group 2.3 on Programming Methodology *Ralph Griswold – cocreated SNOBOL, created Icon (programming language) *Richard Greenblatt (programmer), Richard Greenblatt – Lisp machine, Incompatible Timesharing System, MacHack (chess), MacHack *Neil J. Gunther – authored Pretty Damn Quick (PDQ) performance modeling program *Scott Guthrie (a.k.a. ScottGu) – ASP.NET creator *Jürg Gutknecht – with Niklaus Wirth: Lilith (computer), Lilith computer; Modula-2, Oberon (programming language), Oberon, Zonnon programming languages; Oberon (operating system), Oberon

*Andi Gutmans – cocreated PHP programming language *Michael Guy – Phoenix (computer), Phoenix, work on number theory, computer algebra, higher dimension polyhedra theory,

; work with John Horton Conway

H

*Daniel Ha – cofounder and CEO of blog comment platform Disqus *Nico Habermann – work on

, inter-process communication, process synchronization, deadlock avoidance, software verification, programming languages: ALGOL 60, BLISS, Pascal (programming language), Pascal, Ada (programming language), Ada *Jim Hall (computer programmer), Jim Hall – started the FreeDOS project *Margaret Hamilton (scientist), Margaret Hamilton – Director of Software Engineering Division of MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the space Apollo program *Eric Hehner – predicative programming, formal methods, quote notation,

*David Heinemeier Hansson – created the Ruby on Rails framework for developing web applications *Rebecca Heineman – authored ''Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate'' and ''Dragon Wars'' *Gernot Heiser –

teaching, research, commercialising, Open Kernel Labs, L4 microkernel family#Commercial deployment, OKL4, Wombat *Anders Hejlsberg – Turbo Pascal, Borland Delphi, C Sharp (programming language), C#, TypeScript *Ted Henter – founded Henter-Joyce (now part of Freedom Scientific) created JAWS (screen reader), JAWS screen reader software for blind people *Andy Hertzfeld – cocreated

, cofounded General Magic, cofounded Eazel *D. Richard Hipp – created SQLite *Tony Hoare, C. A. R. Hoare – first implementation of quicksort, ALGOL 60 compiler, Communicating sequential processes *Louis Hodes – Lisp (programming language), Lisp, pattern recognition, logic programming, cancer research *Grace Hopper – Harvard Mark I computer, FLOW-MATIC, COBOL *David A. Huffman – created the Huffman coding; a compression algorithm *Roger Hui – created J (programming language), J *Dave Hyatt – co-authored Mozilla Firefox *P. J. Hyett – cofounded GitHub

I

*Miguel de Icaza – GNOME project leader, initiated Mono (software), Mono project *Roberto Ierusalimschy – Lua (programming language), Lua leading architect *Dan Ingalls – cocreated Smalltalk and Bitblt *Geir Ivarsøy – cocreated Opera (web browser), Opera web browser *Kenneth E. Iverson, Ken Iverson – APL, J (programming language), J *Toru Iwatani – created ''Pac-Man''

J

*Bo Jangeborg – ZX Spectrum games *Paul Jardetzky – authored server program for the Trojan room coffee pot, first webcam *Stephen C. Johnson – yacc *Lynne Jolitz – 386BSD *William Jolitz – 386BSD *Bill Joy – Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD, C shell, csh, vi, cofounded Sun Microsystems *Robert K. Jung – created ARJ

K

*Poul-Henning Kamp – MD5 password hash algorithm, FreeBSD GEOM and GBDE, part of Unix File System, UFS2, FreeBSD Jails, malloc and the Beerware license *Mitch Kapor – Lotus 1-2-3, founded Lotus Development Corporation *Phil Katz – created Zip (file format), authored PKZIP *Ted Kaehler – contributions to Smalltalk, Squeak,

*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 G. Kemeny, John Kemeny – cocreated BASIC *Brian Kernighan – cocreated

(being the ''K'' in that name), authored 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, founded Digital Research (DRI) *Tom Knight (scientist), Tom Knight – Incompatible Timesharing System *Jim Knopf – a.k.a. Jim Button, author PC-File flatfile database; cocreated shareware *Donald E. Knuth – TeX, CWEB, Metafont, ''The Art of Computer Programming'', Concrete Mathematics *Andrew Koenig (programmer), Andrew R. Koenig – co-authored books on C (programming language), C and

and former Project Editor of ISO/ANSI standards committee for C++ *Cornelis H. A. Koster – ''Report on the Algorithmic Language

'', ALGOL 68#transput: Input and output, ALGOL 68 transput

L

*Andre LaMothe – created XGameStation, one of world's first video game console development kits *Leslie Lamport – LaTeX *Butler Lampson – QED original co-author *Peter Landin – ISWIM, J operator, SECD machine, off-side rule, syntactic sugar,

, IFIP WG 2.1 member *Tom Lane (computer scientist), Tom Lane – main author of libjpeg, major developer of PostgreSQL *Sam Lantinga – created Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) *Richard H. Lathwell, Dick Lathwell – codeveloped APL\360 *Chris Lattner – main author of LLVM project *Samuel J. Leffler – Berkeley Software Distribution, BSD, HylaFAX, FlexFAX, LibTIFF, Comparison of open-source wireless drivers#FreeBSD, FreeBSD Wireless Device Drivers *Rasmus Lerdorf – original created PHP *Michael Lesk – Lex (software), Lex *Gordon Letwin – architected OS/2, authored High Performance File System (HPFS) *Jochen Liedtke –

s Eumel, L3 microkernel, L3, L4 microkernel family, L4 *Charles H. Lindsey – IFIP WG 2.1 member, ''Revised Report on

'' *Håkon Wium Lie – co-authored Cascading Style Sheets *Yanhong Annie Liu – programming languages,

s, program design,

, software systems, optimizing, analysis, and transformations, intelligent systems,

, computer security, IFIP WG 2.1 member *Robert Love – Linux kernel developer *Ada Lovelace – first programmer (of Charles Babbages' Analytical Engine) *Al Lowe – created ''Leisure Suit Larry'' series *David Luckham – Lisp (programming language), Lisp, Automated theorem proving, Stanford Pascal (programming language), Pascal Verifier, Complex event processing, Rational Software cofounder (Ada (programming language), Ada compiler) *Hans Peter Luhn – hash-coding, linked list, searching and sorting binary tree

M

*Khaled Mardam-Bey – created mIRC (Internet Relay Chat Client) *Robert C. Martin – authored ''Clean Code'', ''The Clean Coder'', leader of Clean Code movement, signatory on the Agile Manifesto *John Mashey – authored PWB shell, also called Mashey shell *Yukihiro Matsumoto – Ruby (programming language), Ruby *John McCarthy (computer scientist), John McCarthy – Lisp (programming language), Lisp,

, IFIP WG 2.1 member, artificial intelligence *Craig McClanahan – original author Jakarta Struts, architect of Tomcat Catalina servlet container *Daniel D. McCracken – professor at City College of New York, City College and authored ''Guide to ALGOL, Algol Programming'', ''Guide to COBOL, Cobol Programming'', ''Guide to Fortran Programming'' (1957) *Scott A. McGregor – architect and development team lead of

Windows 1.0, co-authored X Window System version 11, and developed Cedar Viewers Windows System at PARC (company), Xerox PARC *Douglas McIlroy – Macro (computer science), macros, pipes and filters, concept of software componentry, Unix tools (spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, tr, etc.) *Marshall Kirk McKusick – Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), work on Unix File System, FFS, implemented soft updates *Sid Meier – author, ''Civilization (series), Civilization'' and ''Railroad Tycoon'', cofounded MicroProse *Bertrand Meyer – Eiffel (programming language), Eiffel, ''Object-oriented design, Object-oriented Software Construction'', design by contract *Bob Miner – cocreated Oracle Database, cofounded Oracle Corporation *Jeff Minter – psychedelic, and often llama-related

s *James G. Mitchell – WATFIV, WATFOR compiler, Mesa (programming language), Spring (operating system), ARM architecture family, ARM architecture *Arvind (computer scientist), Arvind Mithal – formal verification of large digital systems, developing dynamic dataflow architectures, parallel computing programming languages (Id, pH), compiling on parallel machines *Petr Mitrichev – competitive programming, competitive programmer *Cleve Moler – co-authored LINPACK, EISPACK, and MATLAB *Lou Montulli – created Lynx (browser), Lynx browser, HTTP cookie, 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 – authored text-editor Vim (text editor), Vim *David A. Moon – Maclisp, ZetaLisp *Charles H. Moore – created Forth (programming language), Forth language *Roger Moore (computer scientist), Roger Moore – co-developed APL\360, created IPSANET, cofounded I. P. Sharp Associates *Matt Mullenweg – authored WordPress *Boyd Munro – Australian developed Grasp (software), GRASP, owns SDI, one of earliest software development companies *Mike Muuss – authored Ping (networking utility), ping, network tool to detect hosts

N

*Patrick Naughton – early Java (Sun), Java designer, HotJava *Peter Naur (1928–2016) – Backus–Naur form (BNF), ALGOL 60, IFIP WG 2.1 member *Fredrik Neij – cocreated The Pirate Bay *Graham Nelson – created Inform authoring system for interactive fiction *Greg Nelson (computer scientist), Greg Nelson (1953–2015) – satisfiability modulo theories, extended static checking, program verification, Modula-3 committee, ''Simplify'' theorem prover in ESC/Java *Klára Dán von Neumann (1911–1963) – principal programmer for the MANIAC I *Maurice Nivat (1937–2017) – theoretical computer science, ''Theoretical Computer Science (journal), Theoretical Computer Science'' journal,

, IFIP WG 2.1 member *Phiwa Nkambule – cofounded Riovic, founded Cybatar *Peter Norton – programmed Norton Utilities *Kristen Nygaard (1926–2002) – Simula,

O

*Ed Oates – cocreated Oracle Database, cofounded Oracle Corporation *Martin Odersky – Scala (programming language), Scala *Peter O'Hearn – separation logic, bunched logic, Infer Static Analyzer *Jarkko Oikarinen – created Internet Relay Chat (IRC) *Oliver Twins, Andrew and Philip Oliver, the Oliver Twins – many ZX Spectrum games including ''Dizzy (video game), Dizzy'' *John Ousterhout – created Tcl/Tk (software), Tk

P

*Keith Packard – X Window System *Larry Page – cofounded Google, Inc. *Alexey Pajitnov – created game Tetris on Electronica 60 *Seymour Papert – Logo (programming language) *David Park (computer scientist), David Park (1935–1990) – first Lisp (programming language), Lisp implementation, expert in fairness, program schemas, bisimulation in concurrent computing *Mike Paterson –

s, analysis of algorithms (complexity) *Tim Paterson – authored 86-DOS (QDOS) *Markus Persson – created Minecraft *Jeffrey Peterson – key free and open-source software architect, created Quepasa *Charles Petzold – authored many Microsoft Windows programming books *Rob Pike – wrote first bitmapped window system for Unix, cocreated UTF-8 character encoding, authored text editor sam (program), sam and programming environment Acme (text editor), acme, main author of Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Plan 9 and Inferno (operating system), Inferno operating systems, and co-authored Go (programming language), Go programming language *Kent Pitman – technical contributor to the ANSI Common Lisp standard *Tom Preston-Werner – cofounded GitHub

Q

R

*Theo de Raadt – founding member of NetBSD, founded OpenBSD and OpenSSH *Brian Randell – ALGOL 60, software fault tolerance, dependability, pre-1950 history of computing hardware *Jef Raskin – started the

project in Apple Computer, designed Canon Cat computer, developed Archy (software), Archy (The Humane Environment) program *Eric S. Raymond – Open Source movement, authored fetchmail *Hans Reiser – created ReiserFS file system *John Resig – creator and lead developed jQuery JavaScript library *Craig Reynolds (computer graphics), Craig Reynolds – created boids computer graphics simulation *John C. Reynolds – continuations, definitional interpreters, defunctionalization, Forsythe, Gedanken language, intersection types, System F, polymorphic lambda calculus, relational parametricity, separation logic,

*Reinder van de Riet – Editor: ''Europe of Data and Knowledge Engineering'', COLOR-X event modeling language *Dennis Ritchie – C (programming language), C, Unix, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Inferno (operating system), Inferno *Ron Rivest – cocreated RSA (algorithm), RSA algorithm (being the ''R'' in that name). created RC4 and MD5 *John Romero –

s ''

'', '' Quake'' *Blake Ross – co-authored Mozilla Firefox *Douglas T. Ross – Automatically Programmed Tools (APT (programming language), APT), Computer-aided design, structured analysis and design technique, ALGOL X *Guido van Rossum – Python (programming language), Python *Philip Rubin – articulatory synthesis (ASY), sinewave synthesis (SWS), and HADES (software), HADES signal processing system. *Jeff Rulifson – lead programmer on the NLS (computer system), NLS project *Rusty Russell – created iptables for linux *Steve Russell (computer scientist), Steve Russell – first Lisp (programming language), 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 – developed ''RollerCoaster Tycoon (video game), RollerCoaster Tycoon'' and the Transport Tycoon series *Cher Scarlett – Apple Inc., Apple, Webflow, Blizzard Entertainment, World Wide Technology, and USA Today *Bob Scheifler – X Window System, Jini *Isai Scheinberg – IBM engineer, founded PokerStars *Bill Schelter – GNU Maxima, GNU Common Lisp *John M. Scholes, John Scholes – Direct functions *Randal L. Schwartz – Just another Perl hacker *Adi Shamir – cocreated RSA (algorithm), RSA algorithm (being the ''S'' in that name) *Mike Shaver – founding member of Mozilla Organization *Cliff Shaw – Information Processing Language (IPL), the first AI language *Zed Shaw – wrote the Mongrel (web server), Mongrel Web Server, for Ruby web applications *Emily Short – prolific writer of Interactive fiction and co-developed Inform version 7 *Jacek Sieka – developed DC++ an open-source software, open-source, peer-to-peer file sharing, file-sharing client (computing), client *Daniel Siewiorek – electronic design automation, Reliability (computer networking), reliability computing, Context awareness, context aware mobile computing, Wearable computer, wearable computing, computer-aided design, rapid prototyping, fault tolerance *Ken Silverman – created ''Duke Nukem 3D''{{'s graphics engine *Charles Simonyi – Hungarian notation, Bravo (software), Bravo (the first WYSIWYG text editor), Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Word *Colin Simpson (author), Colin Simpson – developed CircuitLogix simulation software *Rich Skrenta – cofounded DMOZ *David Canfield Smith – invented Icon (computing), interface icons, programming by demonstration, developed graphical user interface, Xerox Star; PARC (company), Xerox PARC researcher, cofounded Dest Systems, Cognition *Matthew Smith (games programmer), Matthew Smith – ZX Spectrum games, including ''Manic Miner'' and ''Jet Set Willy'' *Henry Spencer – C News, Regex *Joel Spolsky – cofounded Fog Creek Software and Stack Overflow *Quentin Stafford-Fraser – authored original Virtual Network Computing, VNC viewer, first Windows VNC server, client program for the Trojan room coffee pot, first webcam *Richard Stallman – Emacs, GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), GDB, founder and pioneer of GNU Project, terminal-independent I/O pioneer on Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), Lisp machine manual *Guy L. Steele Jr. – Common Lisp, Scheme (programming language), Scheme, Java (programming language), Java *Alexander Stepanov – created Standard Template Library *Christopher Strachey – draughts playing program *Ludvig Strigeus – created uTorrent, OpenTTD, ScummVM and the technology behind Spotify *Bjarne Stroustrup – created

*Zeev Suraski – cocreated PHP language *Gerald Jay Sussman – Scheme (programming language), Scheme *Herb Sutter – chair of ISO

standards committee and C++ expert *Gottfrid Svartholm – cocreated The Pirate Bay *Aaron Swartz – software developer, writer, Internet activist *Tim Sweeney (game developer), Tim Sweeney – Unreal (1998 video game), The Unreal engine, UnrealScript, ZZT

T

*Amir Taaki – leading developer for Bitcoin project *Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Andrew Tanenbaum – Minix *Audrey Tang, Audrey "Autrijus" Tang – designed Pugs (programming), Pugs *Simon Tatham – Netwide Assembler (NASM), PuTTY *Larry Tesler – the Smalltalk code browser, debugger and object inspector, and (with Tim Mott) the Gypsy (software), Gypsy word processor *Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner – cocreated Opera (web browser), Opera web browser *Avie Tevanian – authored Mach (kernel), Mach kernel *Ken Thompson – mainly designed and authored Unix, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Plan 9 and Inferno (operating system), Inferno operating systems, B (programming language), B and Bon languages (precursors of C (programming language), C), created UTF-8 character encoding, introduced regular expressions in QED and co-authored Go (programming language), Go language *Michael Tiemann – G++, GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) *Linus Torvalds – original author and current maintainer of

kernel and created Git, a source code management system *Andrew Tridgell – Samba (software), Samba, Rsync *

– MUD – together with

, created MUDs *Bob Truel – cofounded DMOZ *Alan Turing – mathematician, computer scientist and Cryptanalysis, cryptanalyst *David Turner (computer scientist), David Turner – SASL (programming language), SASL, Kent Recursive Calculator, Miranda (programming language), Miranda, IFIP WG 2.1 member

V

*Wietse Venema – Postfix (software), Postfix, Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN), TCP Wrapper *Pat Villani – original author 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

*Eiiti Wada – ALGOL N, IFIP WG 2.1 member, Japanese Industrial Standards (JIS) X 0208, 0212, Happy Hacking Keyboard *John Walker (programmer), John Walker – cofounded Autodesk *Larry Wall – Warp (1980s space-war game), rn (newsreader), rn, patch (Unix), patch, Perl *Bob Wallace (computer scientist), Bob Wallace – author PC-Write word processor; considered shareware cocreator *Chris Wanstrath – cofounded GitHub *John Warnock – created PostScript *Robert Watson (computer scientist), Robert Watson – FreeBSD network stack parallelism, TrustedBSD project and OpenBSM *Joseph Henry Wegstein – ALGOL 58, ALGOL 60, IFIP WG 2.1 member, data processing technical standards, fingerprint analysis *Pei-Yuan Wei – authored ViolaWWW, one of earliest graphical browsers *Peter J. Weinberger – cocreated

(being the ''W'' in that name) *Jim Weirich – created Rake, Builder, and RubyGems for Ruby (programming language), Ruby; popular teacher and conference speaker *Joseph Weizenbaum – created ELIZA *David Wheeler (computer scientist), David Wheeler – cocreated subroutine; designed WAKE (cipher), WAKE; co-designed Tiny Encryption Algorithm, XTEA, Burrows–Wheeler transform *Molly White (writer), Molly White – HubSpot; creator of ''Web3 Is Going Just Great'' *Arthur Whitney (computer scientist), Arthur Whitney – A+ (programming language), A+, K (programming language), K *why the lucky stiff – created libraries and writing for Ruby (programming language), Ruby, including quirky, popular ''Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby'' to teach programming *Adriaan van Wijngaarden – Dutch pioneer; ARRA,

, IFIP WG 2.1 member *Bruce Wilcox – created Computer Go, programmed NEMESIS Go Master *Evan Williams (Internet entrepreneur), Evan Williams – created and cofounded language Logo (programming language), Logo *Roberta Williams, Roberta and Ken Williams (game developer), Ken Williams – Sierra Entertainment, ''King's Quest'', graphic adventure game *Sophie Wilson – designed instruction set for ARM architecture family, Acorn RISC Machine, authored BBC BASIC *Dave Winer – developed XML-RPC, Frontier scripting language *Niklaus Wirth – ALGOL W, IFIP WG 2.1 member, Pascal (programming language), Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon (programming language), Oberon *Stephen Wolfram – created Mathematica *Don Woods (programmer), Don Woods – INTERCAL, Colossal Cave Adventure *Philip Woodward – ambiguity function, sinc function, Dirac comb, comb operator, rep operator,

*Steve Wozniak – ''Breakout (video game), Breakout'', Apple Integer BASIC, cofounded Apple Inc. *Will Wright (game designer), Will Wright – created the Sim City series, cofounded Maxis *William Wulf – BLISS system programming language + optimizing compiler, Hydra (operating system), Hydra

, Tartan Laboratories

Y

*Jerry Yang – cocreated Yahoo! *Victor Yngve – authored first string processing language, COMIT *Nobuo Yoneda – Yoneda lemma, Yoneda product,

, IFIP WG 2.1 member

Z

*Matei Zaharia – created Apache Spark *Jamie Zawinski – XEmacs, Lucid Emacs, Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, XScreenSaver *Phil Zimmermann – created encryption software Pretty Good Privacy, PGP, the ZRTP protocol, and Zfone *Mark Zuckerberg – created Facebook

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See also