Application programmers
- Bram Cohen — Wrote BitTorrent
- Charles Simonyi — Invented Hungarian notation. Original author of Microsoft Word. Head of the IP project at Microsoft, now running intentsoft.com
- Dan Bricklin — Wrote Visicalc
- Justin Frankel — Wrote Winamp, NSIS, and Gnutella
- Max Levchin — Co-founder Pay Pal & Slide
- Mitchell Kapor — Founded Lotus
- Neil Hodgson — Wrote Scintilla and SciTE
- Nick Bradbury — Wrote HomeSite, TopStyle, and FeedDemon
- Ray Ozzie — Main architect of Lotus Notes. Now Chief Software Architect at Microsoft.
- Rob Barnaby — Worked some on early Logo, wrote Word Star. Also did Stringcomp, an early string processing language.
BSD hackers
- Bill Joy — Wrote BSD TCP/IP stack, vi
- Chris Torek — BSDI os hacker
- Keith Bostic — Worked on BSD at Berkeley and one of the original authors of BerkeleyDB
- Marshall Kirk McKusick — Designed Berkeley Fast File System.
- Matt Dillon — FreeBSD hacker, founded DragonFly BSD project
- Mike Karels — System architect of BSD 4.3 and 4.4 releases.
- Poul-Henning Kamp — FreeBSD kernel hacker
- Sam Leffler — BSD hacker. Wrote FreeBSD wi-fi drivers
- Theo de Raadt — Founder of OpenBSD project. Original author of OpenSSH.
C hackers
- Fabrice Bellard — Wrote QEMU, TinyCC, FFMPEG; Winner of 2001 IOCCC
- P.J. Plauger — Worked on first commercial C compiler
Chess programmers
- Amir Ban — Co-author of Junior chess program.
- Chrilly Donninger — Author of the Hydra chess program.
- Frans Morsch — Co-author of Fritz chess program.
- Mathias Feist — Co-author of Fritz chess program.
- Shay Bushinsky — Co-author of Junior chess program.
- Stefan Meyer-Kahlen — Author of Shredder chess program
Compiler/VM implementors
- Allison Randal — Architect of Parrot virtual machine
- Dan Sugalski — Original architect of Parrot VM
- Evan Phoenix — Author of Rubinus compiler/virtual machine for Ruby
- Frances Allen — Pioneer in optimizing compilers. First woman to win Turing Award (2006) and first woman IBM fellow.
- L. Peter Deutsch — Author of Ghostscript, Implemented Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1
- Ola Bini — Core JRuby developer
- Simon Peyton Jones — Co-inventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler.
- Thomas Enebo — Principle JRuby developer
- Urs Hölzle — Researcher behind Sun's HotSpot JVM technology.
- Xavier Leroy — Primary developer of OCaml. Wrote LinuxThreads threading package used in pre 2.6 Linux kernels
Database/filesystem implementors
- Bruce Momjian — Core PostgreSQL developer
- Dominic Giampaolo — Wrote BeOS file system
- Donald Chamberlin — Principle designer of SQL; ACM Intercollegiate Programming Contest judge, 1998-2005
- Jeff Bonwick — Chief architect of ZFS
- Mark Maybee — Worked on ZFS DMU at Sun.
- Marshall Kirk McKusick — Designed Berkeley Fast File System.
- Matthew Ahrens — Works on ZFS in kernel group at Sun
- Richard Hipp — Wrote sqlite embedded SQL database
- Tom Lane — Core PostgreSQL developer responsible for optimizer.
Educators
- Brian Harvey — UC Comp Sci professor. Author of Berkeley Logo
- Ellen Spertus — Head of Interdisciplinary Computer Science department at Mills College
Game programmers
- Andy Gavin — Co-founder of Naughty Dog software. Wrote GOAL which was used to develop Jak and Daxter.
- John Carmack — Founder of id Software; lead programmer of Doom, Quake, and others.
- Tim Sweeney — Founder of Epic Games. Wrote the Unreal Engine.
- Wouter van Oortmerssen — Game programmer and language designer
Googlers
- Andy Hertzfeld — Key Macintosh developer
- Guido van Rossum — Invented Python
- Jeff Dean — Google Fellow in Systems Infrastructure Group. Co-inventor of MapReduce.
- Joshua Bloch — Author of Java collections framework. Now at Google.
- Ken Thompson — Inventor of UNIX
- Larry Page — Founded Google
- Paul Buchheit — Creator of GMail
- Peter Norvig — Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI.
- Rob Pike — Author of first bitmap windowing system for Unix. Worked on Plan 9. Now works at Google.
- Sergey Brin — Founded Google
- Steve Yegge — Blogger and Googler
- Udi Manber — VP of Engineering at Google. Co-author of Glimpse, Agrep, and Harvest search packages.
- Urs Hölzle — Researcher behind Sun's HotSpot JVM technology.
Graphics programmers
- Alvy Ray Smith — Graphics pioneer. Worked at LucasFilm, helped found Pixar.
- Dan Piponi — Graphics programmer and theorist.
- Ivan Sutherland — Invented Sketchpad, precursor to modern GUIs
- Jim Blinn — Graphics Fellow at Microsoft
- Paul Haeberli — Computer graphics researcher
- Tom Duff — Invented Duff's device and noted graphics programmer
- Zack Rusin — Qt graphics guru
Haskell programmers
- Audrey Tang — Leader of Pugs project to implement Perl 6 in Haskell
- Don Stewart — Haskell hacker
- Eric Meijer — Architect in SQL server group at Microsoft working on combining functional programming with the CLR and SQL
- Simon Peyton Jones — Co-inventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler.
- Spencer Janssen — Wrote xmonad, a tiling window manager implemened in Haskell
Himself
- Richard Stallman — Wrote Emacs, gcc, and started the Free Software movement.
Internet infrastructure implementors
- Bernie Cosell — One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMP's and a master debugger.
- Brian Behlendorf — Apache organizer
- Eric Allman — Wrote sendmail
- Eric Bina — Co-wrote Mosaic.
- Frank Heart — Managed the group that built the ARPANET.
- Jamie Zawinski — Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker.
- Jarkko Oikarinen — Started IRC
- Jeff Mogul — HP Fellow working on networking performance. Contributed to HTTP 1.1 spec
- Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen — Wrote Gnus and Gmane
- Marc Andreessen — Co-wrote Mosaic. Founded Netscape.
- Paul Vixie — Wrote BIND
- Ray Tomlinson — Wrote first networked email system and gave us the @-sign in email addresses.
- Rob McCool — Wrote NCSA HTTPd; drafted Common Gateway Interface specification
- Robert Thau — Early Apache developer. Started Bianca Troll
- Roy Fielding — One of the principle authors of HTTP specification. Invented REST. Co-founder of Apache project
- Van Jacobson — Redesigned TCP/IP flow control algorithms, saving the net from total collapse. Eponymous inventor of Van Jacobson TCP/IP header compression.
- Vinton Cerf — Father of TCP/IP
- Will Crowther — Wrote Adventure and the inner packet processing loop of the original internet IMPs
Java programmers
- Amy Fowler — Core Java Swing developer
- Craig McClanahan — Original author of Apache Struts
- Dick Wall — Co-host of the Java Posse podcast. Works at Google.
- Doug Lea — Concurrency expert and systems programmer.
- Gavin King — Original author of Hibernate, JBoss Seam
- James Duncan Davidson — Started Apache Ant and Apache Tomcat projects. Author of Java Servlet API and Java API for XML processing J2EE specifications.
- Joshua Bloch — Author of Java collections framework. Now at Google.
- Rod Johnson — Original author of Spring Framework
Javascript gurus
- Alex Russell — Created Dojo Javascript library
- Brendan Eich — Invented Javascript
- Douglas Crockford — JSON founder, JavaScript Architect at Yahoo!
- Sam Stephenson — Created Prototype Javascript library
Language designers
- Alain Colmerauer — Invented Prolog
- Alan Kay — Inventor of Smalltalk. Coined the term "object-oriented programming".
- Alexander Stepanov — Author of the Standard Template Library for C++
- Anders Hejlsberg — Lead architect of C#, Architect of Delphi at Borland. Wrote what became Turbo Pascal
- Arthur Whitney — Invented A+ and K languages and wrote prototype of J language
- Bertrand Meyer — Invented Eiffel
- Bjarne Stroustrup — Invented C++
- Brad Cox — Invented Objective C
- Brendan Eich — Invented Javascript
- Chuck Moore — Invented Forth
- David Korn — Wrote the Korn shell
- Dennis Ritchie — Invented C and contributed to development of UNIX
- Dierk Koenig. — Groovy, Grails contributor
- Eric Meijer — Architect in SQL server group at Microsoft working on combining functional programming with the CLR and SQL
- Graham Nelson — Invented Inform language used to program interatvive fiction
- Gregor Kiczales — Wrote Common Lisp MOP. Invented Aspect Oriented programming.
- Guido van Rossum — Invented Python
- Guillaume Laforge — Groovy project lead
- James Gosling — Invented Java, NeWS windowing system.
- Joe Armstrong — Inventor of Erlang
- John Ousterhout — Invented TCL
- Larry Wall — Invented Perl
- Martin Odersky — Invented Scala
- Niklaus Wirth — Invented Pascal, Modula, Oberon
- Peter Weinberger — The W in AWK
- Rasmus Lerdorf — Invented PHP
- Roberto Ierusalimschy — Invented Lua
- Simon Peyton Jones — Co-inventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler.
- Steve Dekorte — Invented Io language.
- Xavier Leroy — Primary developer of OCaml. Wrote LinuxThreads threading package used in pre 2.6 Linux kernels
- Yukihiro Matsumoto — Invented Ruby
Linux hackers
- Alan Cox — One of Linus Torvalds's main lieutenants. Wrote Linux TCP/IP code.
- Alessandro Rubini — Linux kernel hacker
- Andrew Tridgell — Wrote Samba file server and co-invented rsync algorithm
- Carla Schroder — Long-time Linux geek.
- Ingo Molnár — Linux hacker, author of many Linux perfomance improvements.
- Linus Torvalds — Wrote and maintains Linux kernel. Wrote GIT version control system.
- Mark Shuttleworth — Founded Thawte and Ubuntu project. Previously a Debian developer
- Paul 'Rusty' Russell — One of Linus Torvald's top deputies. Wrote ipchains and netfilter/iptables packet filtering code
- Paul Mackerras — Samba developer
- Val Henson — Kernel hacker and file systems specialist.
Mac developers
- Andy Hertzfeld — Key Macintosh developer
- Bill Atkinson — Early Mac developer. Designed and implemented Hypercard
- Wil Shipley — Wrote Delicious Monster. Founded Omni Group
Methodologists
- Barry Boehem — Software metrics guru
- Martin Fowler — Chief Scientist at Thoughtworks. Author of Refactoring and many other books.
- Robert Martin — Founder and CEO of Object Mentor. C++ and Agile methods expert.
- Watts Humphrey — CMM guru.
Microsoftie
- Leslie Lamport — Distributed systems researcher and developer of LaTeX
Microsofties
- Anders Hejlsberg — Lead architect of C#, Architect of Delphi at Borland. Wrote what became Turbo Pascal
- Bill Gates — Wrote BASIC for Altair
- Butler Lampson — Systems pioneer. Worked on Xerox's Alto.
- Charles Simonyi — Invented Hungarian notation. Original author of Microsoft Word. Head of the IP project at Microsoft, now running intentsoft.com
- David Cutler — Architect of VMS and Windows NT
- Eric Meijer — Architect in SQL server group at Microsoft working on combining functional programming with the CLR and SQL
- Jim Blinn — Graphics Fellow at Microsoft
- Larry Osterman — Longtime Microsoftie
- Paul Allen — Co-founded Microsoft.
- Ray Ozzie — Main architect of Lotus Notes. Now Chief Software Architect at Microsoft.
- Raymond Chen — Worked on OS/2, Windows 95, and Direct X
New-school Lisp hackers
- Andy Gavin — Co-founder of Naughty Dog software. Wrote GOAL which was used to develop Jak and Daxter.
- Dave Fox — Lisp hacker, directior of Lispworks Ltd.
- Edi Weitz — Lisp library hacker extraordinaire. Co-organizer of the European Common Lisp Meetings 2005 and 2006
- Erik Naggum — Lisp hacker
- Joe Marshall — Lisp hacker
- John Foderaro — Original author of Franz's Allegro Common Lisp
- John Harper — Wrote librep and the sawfish window manager
- Luke Gorrie — Lisp and Erlang hacker. Project lead for SLIME.
- Marco Baringer — Common Lisp hacker, author of Uncommon Web
- Paul Graham — Lisp hacker and author.
- Rainer Joswig — Contributes to CL-HTTP
OS gurus
- Andrew Tanenbaum — Created Minix, advocate for micro-kernels.
- David Cutler — Architect of VMS and Windows NT
Old-school Lisp hackers
- Bill Gosper — One of the original MIT hackers. Worked on Lisp machines, Maclisp, and Macsyma
- Dan Weinreb — Founder of Symbolics. Now at ITA.
- Danny Hillis — Founder of Thinking Machines
- Gerald Jay Sussman — Co-creator of Scheme and co-author of The Structure And Interpretation of Computer Programs.
- Guy Steele — Co-inventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five. Currently working on Fortress.
- Hal Abelson — Abelson of Abelson and Sussman. MIT professor.
- Henry Baker — One of the founder of Symbolics; comp sci. researcher
- Jamie Zawinski — Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker.
- John McCarthy — Invented Lisp
- Jonathan Rees — Designed T dialect of Scheme and co-wrote Scheme 48
- Kent Pitman — Technical Editor of Common Lisp ANSI standard
- L. Peter Deutsch — Author of Ghostscript, Implemented Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1
- Marvin Minsky — Artifical Intelligence researcher
- Olin Shivers — Comp Sci professor interested in Scheme and ML. Wrote scsh
- Peter Norvig — Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI.
- Philip Greenspun — Author of Greenspun's Tenth Law and sometimes instructor at MIT
- Richard Fateman — Computer algebraist. Worked on MacSysma and Maxima
- Richard Gabriel — Lisper and Poet. Currently a Distinguished Engineer at IBM. Chair of OOPSLA 2007.
- Richard Greenblatt — Main implementor of Maclisp on PDP-6. Co-founded Lisp Machines, Inc.
- Richard Kelsey — Co-wrote Scheme 48 and edited R5RS
- Rusty Bobrow — BBNer doing work in computational linguistics, speech recognition, and artificial intelligence.
- Scott McKay — Lisp and Dylan designer.
- Steve Russell — One of John McCarthy's grad students. Brought Lisp to life by hand-coding EVAL in assembler. Wrote Spacewar.
Old-school Unix hackers
- Brian Kernighan — The K in AWK and K&R. Author of the original "hello, world" program.
- Charles Hedrick — Lisp Unix hacker
- David Korn — Wrote the Korn shell
- Dennis Ritchie — Invented C and contributed to development of UNIX
- Douglas McIlroy — Unix toolsmith; invented Unix pipelines
- Henry Spencer — Wrote Unix regex library later incorporated into Tcl and Perl. Co-wrote C News news server
- John Gilmore — Contributor to several GNU projects. Co-author of Bootstrap protocol which became DHCP. Founder of EFF, Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus solutions.
- John Mashey — Early Unix hacker
- Ken Thompson — Inventor of UNIX
- Peter Weinberger — The W in AWK
- Rob Pike — Author of first bitmap windowing system for Unix. Worked on Plan 9. Now works at Google.
- Sape Mullender — Member of Technical Staff, Lucent Technologies,Bell Labs Innovations, Computing Sciences Research, Murray Hill, New Jersey.
Perl programmers
- Allison Randal — Architect of Parrot virtual machine
- Audrey Tang — Leader of Pugs project to implement Perl 6 in Haskell
- Damian Conway — Perl hacker and three time winner of the Larry Wall award. Wrote Lingua::Romana::Perligata and others.
- Dan Sugalski — Original architect of Parrot VM
- Ilya Zakharevich — Major contributor to perl5 including a major reworking of the regex engine.
- Mark Jason Dominus — Perl programmer; author of Higher Order Perl
Python programmers
- Adrian Holovaty — Lead developer of Django
- Alex Martelli — Co-author of Python Cookbook and Author of Python in a Nutshell
- Bram Cohen — Wrote BitTorrent
- Jacob Kaplan-Moss — Django developer. Wrote Tivo apps in Python and now hacking Python on the PSP
- 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.
- Ka-Ping Yee — Python hacker extraordinaire.
- Mark Pilgrim — Wrote Universal Feed Parser. Author of Dive into Python and Dive into Accessibility.
- Simon Willison — Django developer. Hacker Liason for Yahoo UK
- Tim Peters — Python hacker and author of Spambayes
Ruby programmers
- Andrew Hunt — Co-founder of Pragmatic Programmers
- Charles Nutter — Principle JRuby developer
- Chris Wanstrath — Notable Rails programmer
- Dave Thomas — Co-founder of Pragmatic Programmers
- David Heinemeier Hansson — Invented Rails
- Evan Phoenix — Author of Rubinus compiler/virtual machine for Ruby
- Ola Bini — Core JRuby developer
- Rick Olsen — Core Rails developer, wrote Mephisto and Beast
- Thomas Enebo — Principle JRuby developer
- Why the lucky stiff — Core Ruby developer and free spirit
- Zed Shaw — Wrote Mongrel (Rails HTTP server)
Scientific programmers
- Gavin Schmidt — Programmer on GISS climate modeling software.
- Michael C. Schatz — Author of a number of gene sequencing programs.
- Peter Karp — Responsible for the development of BioCyc
Security/computer forensics experts
- Bruce Schneier — Security expert. Creator of Twofish block cipher.
- Dan Bernstein — Wrote djbns and qmail
- Dan Farmer — Co-wrote Satan and TCT
- Dan Geer — Security expert
- Marcus Ranum — Security expert and author of Firewall Toolkit and Network Flight Recorder
- Radia Perlman — Invented spanning-tree protocol
- Salvatore Sanfilippo — Software developer and security expert
- Theo de Raadt — Founder of OpenBSD project. Original author of OpenSSH.
- Whitfield Diffie — Discovered principle of public key cryptography
- Wietse Venema — Wrote Postfix. Co-wrote Satan and TCT
Smalltalkers
- Adele Goldberg — Smalltalk designer and documenter.
- Alan Kay — Inventor of Smalltalk. Coined the term "object-oriented programming".
- Avi Bryant — Co-founder Dabble DB
- Dan Ingalls — Smalltalk implementor and designer.
- L. Peter Deutsch — Author of Ghostscript, Implemented Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1
Software patternists
- Erich Gamma — One of the Gang of Four
- John Vlissides — One of the Gang of Four
- Ralph Johnson — One of the Gang of Four
- Richard Helm — One of the Gang of Four
Sun
- Bob Scheifler — Led the development of X Windows while the X Consortium was at MIT
- Guy Steele — Co-inventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five. Currently working on Fortress.
- Jeff Bonwick — Chief architect of ZFS
- Mark Maybee — Worked on ZFS DMU at Sun.
- Matthew Ahrens — Works on ZFS in kernel group at Sun
- Radia Perlman — Invented spanning-tree protocol
Super optimizers
- Michael Abrash — Optimization expert
- Steve Wozniak — Wrote most of the original Apple II software.
Theoreticians
- Donald Knuth — Author of The Art of Computer Programming and TeX
- Jon Kleinberg — Cornell Comp. Sci. professor.
- Peter Van Roy — Contributor to Mozart/Oz programming system. Author of Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming
- Philip Wadler — Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. Contributed to design of Java, Haskell, and XQuery.
- Richard Karp — Researcher in theory of algorithms
Uncategorized
- Austin Meyer — Author of X-Plane and Space Combat flight simulators
- Dennis Crawley — DodgeBall
- Don Hopkins — Invented Pie Menus, working on One Laptop Per Child project.
- Douglas Engelbart — Invented computer mouse
- Edward Feigenbaum — Father of Expert Systems
- Eric Swildens — Founder Microline Software, Co-founder Speedera Networks
- Erik Benson — Cheif Janitorial Officer - Robot Coop
- Graeme Rocher — Grails project lead
- Graham Spencer — Co-founder Excite & Jot-Spot
- Greg Linden — Founder Findory & worked at Amazon
- Jeff Rubin — According to Richard Gabriel a "code-writing savant".
- Joel Reymont — Open Poker
- John Socha — Wrote many DOS software packages for Norton Computing
- Jon Bentley — Author of Programming Pearls books.
- Munjal Shah — Co-founder Riya
- Naval Ravikanth — Founder vast.com
- Peter Norton — Wrote the first version of the Norton Utilities
- Robert Morris — Wrote the Internet Worm and co-founded Viaweb with Paul Graham
- Roger Hui — Implementor of of J language
- Russ Cox — Worked on Plan 9. Represented U.S. at 1995 International Olympiad in Informatics
- Simon Tatham — Author of PuTTY
- Stephen Wolfram — Invented Mathematica
- Trevor Blackwell — Principal at Viaweb. Now founder and CEO of Anybots
Unix app programmers
- Bob Scheifler — Led the development of X Windows while the X Consortium was at MIT
- Bram Moolenaar — Wrote VIM (Vi IMproved)
- Keith Packard — X Windows hacker, founded X.Org Server project
- Miguel de Icaza — Wrote GNOME and Mono
- Peter Mattis — Co-wrote GIMP. Googler.
- Spencer Kimball — Co-wrote GIMP. Googler.
Version control authors
- Linus Torvalds — Wrote and maintains Linux kernel. Wrote GIT version control system.
- Matt Mackall — Wrote Mecurial version control system.
- Tom Lord — Scheme and C hacker. Wrote GNU Arch
Web 2.0 creators
- Aaron Swartz — Invented web.py
- Alex Russell — Created Dojo Javascript library
- Biz Stone — Twitter
- Brad Fitzpatrick — Wrote LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, Perlbal
- Douglas Crockford — JSON founder, JavaScript Architect at Yahoo!
- Evan Williams — Twitter
- Janus Friis — Founder of Joost, Skype, Kazaa
- Mark Fletcher — Founder Bloglines, egroups
- Mark Zuckerberg — Founder and CEO of Facebook
- Niklas Zennstrom — Founder of Joost, Skype, Kazaa
- Paul Buchheit — Creator of GMail
- Peter-Paul Koch — Javascript guru. Maintains quirksmode website.
- Sam Stephenson — Created Prototype Javascript library
Women
- Adele Goldberg — Smalltalk designer and documenter.
- Allison Randal — Architect of Parrot virtual machine
- Amy Fowler — Core Java Swing developer
- Audrey Tang — Leader of Pugs project to implement Perl 6 in Haskell
- Carla Schroder — Long-time Linux geek.
- Elizabeth Rather — Colleague of Chuck Moore and second ever Forth programmer
- Ellen Spertus — Head of Interdisciplinary Computer Science department at Mills College
- Frances Allen — Pioneer in optimizing compilers. First woman to win Turing Award (2006) and first woman IBM fellow.
- Radia Perlman — Invented spanning-tree protocol
- Val Henson — Kernel hacker and file systems specialist.
Writers/bloggers/consultants
- Bruce Eckel — Founding member of ANSI/ISO C++ committee. Author of Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++.
- Joel Spolsky — FogCreekSoftware
- Scott Meyers — Author of Effective C++, More Effective C++, Effective STL
- Steve Yegge — Blogger and Googler
XPers
- Kent Beck — Creator of XP
- Michael Feathers — XP guru
- Ward Cunningham — Wrote the first Wiki and FIT.
(42 categories, 284 names)