Rich Hickey
The creator of Clojure and Datomic, known for a body of talks arguing that simplicity, immutability, and a disciplined treatment of state are the foundations of reliable software.
People
The inventors and builders behind the languages and the tools.
152 entries, all primary-sourced
Richard Bellman
American applied mathematician who invented dynamic programming in the 1950s, coined the curse of dimensionality, and lent his name to the Bellman equation and the Bellman-Ford algorithm.
Richard Karp
Complexity theorist whose 1972 paper proved 21 classic problems NP-complete, turning NP-completeness into a practical tool, and who won the 1985 Turing Award.
Richard Stallman
Programmer who launched the GNU Project and the free software movement, wrote GNU Emacs and GCC, devised copyleft and the GPL, and founded the Free Software Foundation.
Rob Pike
Bell Labs veteran who worked on Unix and Plan 9 and co-designed UTF-8 with Ken Thompson, then co-created the Go language at Google.
Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob)
Software craftsman who formulated the SOLID principles, wrote 'Clean Code' and 'Clean Architecture,' signed the Agile Manifesto, and became a leading advocate of software professionalism and test-driven development.
Robert Tappan Morris
Cornell graduate student who wrote the 1988 Internet worm - the first felony conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act - and later co-founded Y Combinator and became an MIT professor.
Robert Tarjan
Computer scientist who designed many fundamental graph and data-structure algorithms, introduced amortized analysis, and shared the 1986 Turing Award with John Hopcroft.
Robin Milner
British computer scientist who created the ML language and its type system, the LCF machine-checked proof tool, and the CCS and pi-calculus theories of concurrency; he won the 1991 Turing Award.
Ron Rivest
MIT cryptographer, the 'R' in RSA, co-recipient of the 2002 Turing Award.
Roy Fielding
Computer scientist who defined the REST architectural style in his 2000 PhD dissertation, co-authored the HTTP/1.1 specification, and co-founded the Apache HTTP Server project.
Ryan Dahl
Programmer who created Node.js in 2009, bringing JavaScript to the server with an event-driven, non-blocking model, and later created the Deno runtime.
Salvatore Sanfilippo
The Italian programmer, known as antirez, who created Redis.
Sanjay Ghemawat
Google engineer and frequent Jeff Dean collaborator who co-authored GFS, MapReduce, and Bigtable and co-created LevelDB.
Sid Sijbrandij
Co-founder and longtime CEO of GitLab, known for running the company all-remote with a public handbook and radical transparency.
Simon Peyton Jones
A principal designer of Haskell and lead developer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, and a prolific researcher and explainer of functional programming.
Solomon Hykes
Co-founder of dotCloud who created and first demoed Docker in 2013, popularizing Linux containers for mainstream software delivery.
Stephen Cook
Complexity theorist who formulated the P vs NP problem and proved that satisfiability is NP-complete, winning the 1982 Turing Award.
Tim Berners-Lee
British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web at CERN, writing the first browser, server, and the HTTP, HTML, and URL standards.
Tim Bray
Canadian software developer and a co-editor of the XML 1.0 specification, later involved in the Atom syndication format and other core web data standards.
Tony Hoare
British computer scientist who invented Quicksort, created Hoare logic and the CSP model of concurrency, and won the 1980 Turing Award.
Walter Bright
A veteran compiler writer who built the first native C++ compiler, Zortech C++, and later created the D programming language.
Whitfield Diffie
American cryptographer who, with Martin Hellman, invented public-key cryptography and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange in 1976 and shared the 2015 Turing Award.
Winston Royce
Software engineer whose 1970 paper introduced the diagram that became the waterfall model - while warning that the pure sequential approach 'is risky and invites failure.'
Ray Tomlinson
Engineer at Bolt Beranek and Newman who sent the first network email between two computers on the ARPANET around 1971 and chose the @ sign to separate a user name from a host name.
Federico Faggin
Federico Faggin led the design that turned the Intel 4004 concept into working silicon, created the MOS silicon-gate process behind it, and later architected the Zilog Z80 and cofounded Synaptics.
Ted Hoff
Marcian 'Ted' Hoff was the Intel engineer credited with the architectural idea of the 4004: replacing a calculator's custom logic chips with a single general-purpose programmable CPU.
Ed Catmull
Computer scientist who invented the z-buffer and texture mapping in his 1974 PhD thesis, co-created Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces, co-founded Pixar, and shared the 2019 ACM A.M. Turing Award with Pat Hanrahan.
Bill Gates
William H. Gates III co-founded Microsoft after writing Altair BASIC with Paul Allen in 1975; in the micro era he drove the software-licensing model and the operating-system deals that put Microsoft software on most personal computers.
Paul Allen
Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates, co-wrote Altair BASIC in 1975, and is credited with coining the name Micro-Soft; he spotted the Altair and pushed the two of them to write software for it.
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs co-founded Apple Computer in 1976 and drove its product vision and marketing, pushing the Apple I from a hobby board into a salable product and championing the Apple II, Lisa, and Macintosh.
Steve Wozniak
Steve Wozniak was the engineer who designed the Apple I and Apple II almost single-handedly, turning a Homebrew Computer Club hobby project into the machines that founded Apple and helped create the personal computer industry.
David Boggs
American electrical engineer who co-invented Ethernet with Robert Metcalfe at Xerox PARC and co-authored the foundational 1976 paper.
Ward Christensen
American programmer who, with Randy Suess, built CBBS, the first bulletin board system, in 1978, and who wrote the XMODEM file-transfer protocol in 1977. Both became foundational to the dial-up online world.
Dan Bricklin
Dan Bricklin co-created VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, with Bob Frankston in 1979. He is often called the father of the spreadsheet.
Jim Clark
Computer scientist and entrepreneur who built the Geometry Engine at Stanford, founded Silicon Graphics in 1982, and later co-founded Netscape.
Paul Mockapetris
American computer scientist who invented the Domain Name System in 1983 while at USC's Information Sciences Institute, authoring the founding DNS specifications RFC 882/883 and the definitive RFC 1034/1035.
Brad Cox
Co-creator, with Tom Love, of Objective-C and author of 'Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach,' who envisioned reusable 'software components' bought and assembled like off-the-shelf parts.
Van Jacobson
American computer scientist who designed TCP congestion control (1988), saving the early Internet from congestion collapse, and who wrote the widely used diagnostic tools traceroute and tcpdump at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. He later helped originate Named Data Networking.
John Romero
Co-founder, designer, and programmer at id Software who shaped the level design and feel of Doom and Quake, wrote many of id's internal tools, and is credited with coining the multiplayer term deathmatch.
Jon "maddog" Hall
Longtime free-software advocate and executive director of Linux International, who met Linus Torvalds in 1994, recognized Linux's commercial importance early, and spent decades promoting it worldwide.
Ed Roberts
Henry Edward 'Ed' Roberts, founder of MITS and designer of the Altair 8800, is often called the father of the personal computer for building the first commercially successful microcomputer kit.
Eric S. Raymond
Eric S. Raymond (ESR) is the author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, co-founder and first president of the Open Source Initiative, and publisher of the Halloween Documents; he became the leading advocate of the open source movement.
John Carmack
Lead programmer and co-founder of id Software whose engines powered Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, bringing fast real-time 3D to ordinary PCs. He later open-sourced id's engines under the GPL and moved on to virtual reality at Oculus.
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens is the author of the Open Source Definition and the Debian Free Software Guidelines, a former Debian Project Leader, and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative.
Jon Postel
Jon Postel edited the RFC series for nearly three decades, ran the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority almost single-handedly, and authored or co-authored many of the core internet specifications, including the Internet Protocol, TCP, and SMTP.
Joel Spolsky
Software writer and entrepreneur, author of the Joel on Software blog and the Joel Test, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, Trello, and Stack Overflow.
Bob Kahn
American engineer who co-invented the TCP/IP protocols with Vint Cerf, originated DARPA's internet program, founded CNRI, and shared the 2004 ACM Turing Award.