Top 10 Greatest Programmers in the World of all Time

1. Margaret Heafield Hamilton (born August 17, 1936): is As the Director of the Software Engineering Division at Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, she headed up the team which designed and built the on-board flight control software for NASA’s Apollo and SkyLab missions. In 1986, she became the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was developed around the Universal Systems Language based on her paradigm of Development Before the Fact (DBTF) for systems and software design.

2. Linus Benedict Torvalds (born December 28, 1969) : is a Finnish-American software engineer who is the creator and, for a long time, principal developer, of the Linux kernel, which became the kernel for operating systems (and many distributions of each) such as GNU and years later Android and Chrome OS. He also created the revision control system Git as well as the diving log software Subsurface.

3. Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (Sep 9, 1941 — Oct 12, 2011) : an American computer scientist who created the C programming language. Dennis also co-created the UNIX operating system. For his work, in 1983 he received the Turing Award from the ACM, the Hamming Medal in 1990 from the IEEE and in 1999 the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton. He was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007.

4. Bjarne Stroustrup (born 30 December 1950): Bjarne Stroustrup is a Danish computer scientist who is credited for the creation and the development of the widely used and highly successful C++ programming language. He not only invented it, but also evolved it, all by himself, by writing its early definitions, producing its first implementation, formulating its design criteria, designing all its major facilities, processing extension proposals for standards committee and its standard textbook. He is a visiting professor at Columbia University, and works at Morgan Stanley as a Managing Director in New York.

5. Tim Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955): Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist who is renowned all across the globe because of his creation of the World Wide Web (WWW) as well as the implementation of the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet in November, 1989. Berners-Le is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web’s continued development.

6. Kenneth Lane (born February 4, 1943): commonly referred to as ken in hacker circles, is an American pioneer of computer science. Having worked at Bell Labs for most of his career, Thompson designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating systems. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-invented the Go programming language. Ken’s other contributions included his work on regular expressions, early computer text editors QED, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding.

7. Guido van Rossum (born 31 January1956) : is a Dutch programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language. In the Python community, Van Rossum is known as a “Benevolent Dictator For Life” (BDFL), meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary. He was employed by Google from 2005 until 7 December 2012, where he spent half his time developing the Python language. In January 2013, Van Rossum started working for Dropbox. Rossum has been recognized as a distinguished engineer by the Association for Computing Machinery and also received the NLUUG Award in May 2003.

8. James Arthur Gosling (born May 19, 1955): is a Canadian computer scientist known as father of the Java programming language. He has also made major contributions to several other software systems, such as NeWS and Gosling Emacs. He co-wrote the “bundle” program, a utility thoroughly detailed in Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike’s book The Unix Programming Environment..Due to his extra-ordinary achievements Gosling was elected to Foreign Associate member of the United States National Academy of Engineering.

9. Anders Hejlsberg (born December 1960 ) : is a prominent Danish software engineer known as Creator of Turbo Pascal. He was the original author of Turbo Pascal and the chief architect of Delphi. He currently works for Microsoft as the lead architect of C# and core developer on TypeScript. He is Winner of Dr. Dobb’s Excellence in Programming Award in 2001

10. Donald Ervin Knuth (born January 10, 1938) : is an American computer scientist and mathematician as well as a Professor Emeritus (retired professor) at Stanford University. Knuth has been dubbed as the Father of the Analysis of Algorithms as he has contributed to the development of rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it. Knuth has also popularized the asymptotic notation and he is also the creator of the TeX computer typesetting system and the METAFONT font definition language and rendering system. He has contributed to several branches of theoretical computer science and has also created the Computer Modern family of typefaces.

References: All images are taken from following websites:

[1] https://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11Hamilton.html

[2]https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie

[4] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bjarne_Stroustrup

[5] By Uldis Bojārs — Flickr., CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2540892

[6] By National Inventors Hall of Fame — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3jOJfrOknA, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=122644515

[7]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_van_Rossum#/media/File:Guido_van_Rossum_OSCON_2006.jpg

[8]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling#/media/File:James_Gosling_2008.jpg

[9]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg#/media/File:Anders_Hejlsberg.jpg

[10] https://www.goodreads.com/photo/author/64941.Donald_Ervin_Knuth