Disagree or not, programmers are some of the greatest people to have walked the surface of this planet. Their inventions in various fields have gone a long way in changing the way we live and do things. See the list of th top 10 greatest programmers of all time.
An American computer scientist, Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, is remembered for pioneering the digital era. He created C programming language which is mostly used in developing software applications and operating systems. He is also the co-creator of UNIX operating system. After he passed away on 12 October, 2011, Fedora 16 Linux distro was released in his memory.
2. Bjarne Stroustrup:
A Danish computer scientist, Stroustrup is remembered for his creation of C++ programming language. He invented the language, evolved it and then produced its first implementation too. He still holds the position of College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science at Texas A&M University and he is also a visiting professor at Columbia University.
3. Linus Torvalds:
Torvalds is a Finnish American software engineer who has developed Linux kernel. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel and now he is the project coordinator. In 2012 he was presented with the Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland for creating the new open source operating system. Torvalds also created the distributed version control system called Git in 2005.
4. James Gosling:
A Canadian computer scientist, Gosling, is known as the father of Java programming language. He is also known for his contributions to other software systems like NeWS and Gosling Emacs. He has coded a number of other programs too. He was elected as the Foreign Associate member of the United States National Academy of Engineering.
5. Tim Berners-Lee:
Lee is a British computer scientist who has created World Wide Web and also implemented first successful communication between Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet. He is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
6. Anders Hejlsberg:
Hejlsberg is a renowned Danish software engineer who co-designed popular programming languages and created C# programming language. He is also the author of Turbo Pascal and the chief architect of Delphi. Now he is the lead architect of C# at Microsoft and core developer on TypeScript.
7. Brian Kernighan:
He is again a Canadian computer scientist who is the co-creator and developer of UNIX. He also co-created AWK and AMPL programming languages. Presently he is working as a Professor and the Undergraduate Department Representative at the Computer Science Department of Princeton University. He has authored several UNIX programs including ditroff and cron for Version 7 Unix.
8. Ken Thompson:
Kenneth Thompson is considered as the pioneer of computer science. He designed and implemented the original Unix OS and invented B programming language, which is being succeeded by C language. He also co-created Plan 9 operating systems and he has been working with Google since 2006. He also co-invented Go programming language.
9. Donald Knuth:
An American computer scientist and also a mathematician, Knuth is called the “Father of the Analysis of Algorithms”. He has huge contributions in developing analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematised formal mathematical techniques for it. He is also the creator of TeX computer typesetting system and the METAFONT font definition language and rendering system. He has also created the Computer Modern family of typefaces.
10. Guido van Rossum:
Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer and the author of Python programming language. He worked with Google from 2005 to 2012 and in January 2013 he started working with Dropbox. He developed Python language while working with Google.
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