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.

See also: Game programmer, List of computer scientists Free Software authors

A - B - C - D-F - G-H - I-J - K-L - M - N-R - S - T-V - W-Z

A

Clifford Adams - author of the UseModWiki wiki software
Leonard Adleman - co-inventor of the RSA algorithm (the A in the name stands for Adleman), coined the term computer virus
Alfred Aho - co-creator of AWK programming language (the A in the name stands for Aho)
Paul Allen - Altair BASIC, Apple II BASIC, co-founded Microsoft
Eric Allman - sendmail, syslog
Marc Andreessen - co-creator of Mosaic web browser, co-founder of Netscape
Bill Atkinson - QuickDraw, HyperCard

B

Donald Becker - Linux Ethernet drivers, Beowulf clustering
Sir Tim Berners-Lee - inventor of the World Wide Web
Brian Behlendorf - Apache
Daniel J. Bernstein - djbdns, qmail
Eric Bina - co-creator of Mosaic web browser
Bert Bos - author of Argo web browser, co-author of Cascading Style Sheets
David Bradley - coder on the IBM PC project team who wrote the Control-Alt-Delete keyboard handler, embedded in all PC-compatible operating systems
Dan Bricklin - co-creator of VisiCalc, the first personal spreadsheet program
Sergey Brin - co-creator of Google
Richard Brodie - Microsoft Word
Danielle Bunten Berry (Dani Bunten) - M.U.L.E, multiplayer video game

C

Steve Capps - co-creator of Macintosh and Newton
John Carmack - first person shooters DOOM, Quake
Vinton Cerf - TCP/IP, NCP
Steve Chamberlain - BFD, Cygwin
Mike Cowlishaw - REXX and NetRexx, LEXX editor, image processing, decimal arithmetic packages
Alan Cooper - Visual Basic
Alan Cox - a developer of the Linux kernel
Brad Cox - Objective-C
Mark Crispin – inventor of IMAP, author of UW-IMAP, one of the reference implementations of IMAP4
Ward Cunningham - inventor of the WikiWiki concept
Dave Cutler - architect of Windows NT, VMS

D-F

James Duncan Davidson - creator of Tomcat, now part of the Jakarta Project
L. Peter Deutsch - Ghostscript
Peter Deutsch - qed text editor original co-author
Edsger Dijkstra - contributions to ALGOL, Dijkstra's algorithm, Go To Statement Considered Harmful
Les Earnest - author of the finger program
Larry Ellison - co-creator of Oracle database, co-founder of Oracle Corporation
Marc Ewing - creator of Red Hat Linux
Jay Fenlason - original hack, GAS
David Filo - co-creator of Yahoo
Peter Fraser - FRED text editor

G-H

Bill Gates - Altair BASIC, Apple II BASIC, co-founded Microsoft
John Gilmore - GDB
Adele Goldberg - co-inventor of Smalltalk
James Gosling - Java, Gosling Emacs, NeWS
Bill Gosper - hashlife, Minskytron
Paul Graham - Yahoo! Store, On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp
Richard Greenblatt - Lisp machine, Incompatible Timesharing System, MackHack
Ralph Griswold - co-creator of SNOBOL and creator of Icon programming language.
Andi Gutmans - co-creator of PHP programming language
Cecil Hastings - wrote the classic Approximations for Digital Computers 1950s formulas for sin, cos, etc.
Anders Hejlsberg -- Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#
Andy Hertzfeld - co-creator of Macintosh, co-founder of General Magic, co-founder of Eazel
C. A. R. Hoare - first implementation of quicksort, Algol 60 compiler
Grace Hopper - Navy Mark I computer, FLOW-MATIC (which heavily influenced COBOL)

I-J

Miguel de Icaza - GNOME project leader
Dan Ingalls - co-inventor of Smalltalk
Toru Iwatani - creator of Pac Man
Bo Jangeborg - ZX Spectrum games
Steven C. Johnson - yacc
Lynne Jolitz - 386BSD
William Jolitz - 386BSD
Bill Joy - BSD, vi; founded Sun Microsystems

K-L

Ted Kaehler - co-inventor of Smalltalk

Mitch Kapor - Lotus 1-2-3, founded Lotus Development Corporation
Phil Katz - creator of the Zip (file format), author of PKZIP
Mel Kaye [1], a Real Programmer
Stan Kelly-Bootle - Manchester Mark I, The Devil's DP Dictionary
Brian Kernighan - co-creator of AWK programming language (the K in the name stands for Kernighan), author of ditroff text-formatting tool
Gary Kildall - CP/M
Tom Knight - Incompatible Timesharing System
Donald E. Knuth - TeX, CWEB, Metafont, The Art of Computer Programming
Leslie Lamport - LaTeX
Butler Lampson - qed text editor original co-author
Rasmus Lerdorf - original creator of PHP
Michael Lesk - Lex
Håkon Wium Lie - co-author of Cascading Style Sheets
Ada Lovelace - First programmer (of Babbage Machines)

M

Yukihiro Matsumoto - Ruby
John McCarthy - Lisp
Craig McClanahan - original author of Jakarta Struts, architect of Tomcat Catalina servlet container
Douglas McIlroy - pipes and filters, concept of software components, Unix tools ( spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, tr, etc.)
Marshall Kirk McKusick - BSD
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
Lou Montulli - creator of Lynx browser, cookies, the blink tag, server push and client pull, HTTP proxying, HTTPS over SSL, browser integration with animated GIFs, founding member of HTML working group at W3C
Bram Moolenaar - author of text-editor Vim
Dave Moon - MacLisp, ZetaLisp
Chuck Moore - Forth
Urban Müller - Brainfuck language
Mike Muuss - author of Ping, network tool to detect hosts

N-R

Col Needham - creator of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
Kristen Nygaard - SIMULA
Ed Oates - co-creator of Oracle database, co-founder of Oracle Corporation
Jarkko Oikarinen - creator of Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
Andrew and Philip Oliver, The Oliver Twins - Many ZX Spectrum games including Dizzy
Larry Page - co-creator of Google
Tim Paterson - QDOS
Alexey Pajitnov - inventor of the game Tetris on the Electronica 60
Charles Petzold - author of many Microsoft Windows programming books
Rob Pike - co-creator of UTF-8 character encoding, creator of editor sam, part of creation of Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems
Jef Raskin - started the Macintosh project in Apple Computers, designed Canon Cat computer, developed The Humane Environment program
Dennis Ritchie - C, Unix
Ron Rivest - co-inventor of the RSA algorithm (the R in the name stands for Rivest)
Mark Rochkind - SCCS, see SCM, SCM History
Guido van Rossum - Python
Eric Raymond - Open Source movement
Steve Russell - First Lisp interpreter; Original Spacewar graphic computer game.

S

Bill Schelter - GNU Maxima, GNU Common Lisp
Adi Shamir - co-inventor of the RSA algorithm (the S\ in the name stands for Shamir)
Cliff Shaw - IPL, the first AI language
Charles Simonyi - Hungarian notation, Microsoft Word
Henry Spencer - C-News, Regex
Richard Stallman - Emacs, GCC, GDB, founder of the GNU Project, terminal-independant I/O pioneer on ITS, Lisp machine manual (chineual)
Guy Steele - Common Lisp, Scheme
Bjarne Stroustrup - C++
Zeev Suraski - co-creator of PHP programming language
Gerald Jay Sussman - Scheme
Tim Sweeney - The Unreal engine, UnrealScript, ZZT

T-V

Andrew Tanenbaum - Minix
Larry Tesler - Gypsy
Avie Tevanian - author of the Mach kernel
Ken Thompson - Unix, B (precursor of C), Bon programming language, co-creator of UTF-8 character encoding, introduced regular expressions in qed text editor
Michael Tiemann - GCC
Linus Torvalds - original author and current maintainer of the Linux kernel
Andrew Tridgell - Samba, Rsync
Wietse Venema - Postfix, SATAN, TCP Wrapper
Paul Vixie - BIND, Cron

W-Z

Larry Wall - warp, rn, patch, Perl
John Warnock - creator of PostScript
Pei-Yuan Wei - author of Viola, one of the earliest graphical browsers
Peter Weinberger - co-creator of AWK programming language (the W in the name stands for Weinberger)
Roberta and Ken Williams -- Sierra, King's Quest, graphic adventure game
Dave Winer – developed XML-RPC, Frontier scripting language
Niklaus Wirth - Pascal
Don Woods - INTERCAL, Colossal Cave Adventure
Steve Wozniak - Breakout, Apple Integer BASIC, founded Apple Computer (with Steve Jobs)
Jerry Yang - co-creator of Yahoo
Egon Zakrajšek; - pioneer of computer science in Slovenia, texbooks for Z-23 assembler, structran
Jamie Zawinski - Lucid Emacs, Netscape, Mozilla, XScreenSaver