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

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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, Applesoft II BASIC, co-founded Microsoft
• Eric Allman - sendmail, syslog
• Marc Andreessen - co-creator of Mosaic, co-founder of Netscape
• Bill Atkinson - QuickDraw, HyperCard

B

• John Backus - FORTRAN, BNF
• Kailash Balnac - Metatag
• Richard Bartle - MUD, with Roy Trubshaw, the father of MUDs
• Donald Becker - Linux Ethernet drivers, Beowulf clustering
• Doug Bell - Dungeon Master series of computer games
• 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
• Deane Blazie founder of Blazie Engineering (now part of Freedom Scientific), created technology for blind people who use braille
• 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 BIOSes
• Andrew Braybrook - video games Paradroid and Uridium
• Larry Breed - co-developer of programming language|APL\360" target="_blank" >^*
• Jack Bresenham - creator of Bresenham's line algorithm
• 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
• Jim Button - author PC-File flatfile database; he is considered one of the fathers of shareware

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
• Sherry Chen - programmer extraordinare
• Alain Colmerauer - Prolog
• 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 Christensen - Wrote the first BBS (Bulletin Board System) system CBBS
• William Crowther - Colossal Cave Adventure
• 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, Assembler for PDP-1, XDS-940 timesharing system, QED original co-author
• Edsger Dijkstra - contributions to ALGOL, Dijkstra's algorithm, Go To Statement Considered Harmful
• Matt Dillon, programmer of various software including DICE and DragonflyBSD
• Les Earnest - author of the finger program
• Brendan Eich - creator of JavaScript
• Larry Ellison - co-creator of Oracle database, co-founder of Oracle Corporation
• Marc Ewing - creator of Red Hat Linux
• Stuart Feldman - creator of make, author of Fortran 77 compiler, part of original group that created Unix
• Jay Fenlason - original hack, GAS
• David Filo - co-creator of Yahoo!
• Andrew Fluegelman - author PC-Talk communications software; he is considered one of the fathers of shareware
• Brian Fox - creator of Bash, Readline, GNU Finger, Meta-HTML
• Peter Fraser - FRED text editor
• Jim Fruchterman founder of Arkenstone (now part of Freedom Scientific) created scanners for blind people
• Dan Farmer Creator of COPS and SATAN Security Scanners

G - H

• Elon Gasper - co-founded BrightStar Technology, patented realistic facial movements for in-game speech. HyperAnimator, Alphabet Blocks, etc.
• 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 - Macsyma, Lisp machine, hashlife, helped Donald Knuth on Vol.2 of The Art of Computer Programming (Semi-numerical algorithms)
• Paul Graham - Yahoo! Store, On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp
• John Graham-Cumming - author of POPFile, a Bayesian filter-based e-mail classifier
• Richard Greenblatt - Lisp machine, Incompatible Timesharing System, MacHack
• Ralph Griswold - co-creator of SNOBOL and creator of Icon programming language.
• Andi Gutmans - co-creator of PHP programming language
• Douglas Richard Hanks, Jr. - creator of Sudosh and Enterprise Audit Shell (EAS)
• Brian Harvey - UCB Logo, see Logo programming language
• Cecil Hastings - wrote the classic Approximations for Digital Computers 1950s formulas for sin, cos, etc.
• David Heinemeier Hansson - created the Ruby on Rails framework for developing web applications.
• Anders Hejlsberg - Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#
• Ted Henter founder of Henter-Joyce (now part of Freedom Scientific) creator of Jaws, voice software for blind people
• 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, Communicating sequential processes
• Joshua Holloway - Perl implementation of the MSN Messenger API
• Grace Hopper - Navy Mark I computer, FLOW-MATIC (which heavily influenced COBOL)
• Dave Hyatt - co-author of Mozilla Firefox

I - J

• Miguel de Icaza - GNOME project leader, initiator of the Mono project
• Dan Ingalls - co-inventor of Smalltalk, Bitblt, and Pop-up Menus
• Ken Iverson - APL, J
• Toru Iwatani - creator of Pac-Man
• Bo Jangeborg - ZX Spectrum games
• Paul Jardetzky - author of the server program for the first webcam
• Stephen C. Johnson - yacc
• Lynne Jolitz - 386BSD
• William Jolitz - 386BSD
• Bill Joy - BSD, vi; founded Sun Microsystems
• Robert K. Jung - creator of ARJ

K - L

• Ted Kaehler - co-inventor of Smalltalk
• Pavel Kanzelsberger - creator of Pixel image editor
• Mitch Kapor - Lotus 1-2-3, founded Lotus Development Corporation
• Phil Katz - creator of the ZIP file format, author of PKZIP
• Mel Kaye ^*, 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 original co-author
• Tom Lane - primary author of libjpeg, major developer of PostgreSQL
• Dick Lathwell - co-developer of programming language|APL\360" target="_blank" >^*
• Greg Lehey - FreeBSD developer, originator of the Vinum Volume Manager
• Rasmus Lerdorf - original creator of PHP
• Michael Lesk - Lex
• Graziano Liberati - co-author of ZNF
• Håkon Wium Lie - co-author of Cascading Style Sheets
• Robert Love - Linux kernel developer
• Ada Lovelace - First programmer (of Babbage Machines)

M

• Raphael Manfredi - contributions to Perl, software architect and maintainer of gtk-gnutella
• Yukihiro Matsumoto - Ruby
• John McCarthy - Lisp
• Craig McClanahan - original author of Jakarta Struts, architect of Tomcat Catalina servlet container
• Daniel D. McCracken - professor at City College and author of Guide to Fortran Programming (1957)
• Michael McGrady - creator of custom browse buttons for file uploads, Java, aeronautics and astronautics distributed computing.
• Douglas McIlroy - pipes and filters, concept of software componentry, 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, HTTP over SSL, browser integration with animated GIFs, founding member of HTML working group at W3C
• Bram Moolenaar - author of text-editor Vim
• David Moon - Maclisp, ZetaLisp
• Charles H. Moore - inventor of the Forth programming language
• Roger Moore - co-developer of programming language|APL\360" target="_blank" >^*, creator of IPSANET, co-founder of I.P. Sharp Associates
• Urban Müller - Brainfuck language
• Mike Muuss - author of ping, network tool to detect hosts

N - R

• Graham Nelson - creator of the Inform authoring system for Interactive fiction
• Col Needham - creator of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
• Peter Norton - programmer of the famous file manager program, Norton Commander
• 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
• Seymour Papert - Logo programming language
• Tim Paterson - QDOS
• Alexey Pajitnov - inventor of the game Tetris on the Electronica 60
• Charles Petzold - author of many Microsoft Windows programming books
• Jeffrey Peterson - key F/OSS architect, creator of Quepasa
• Rob Pike - Wrote first bitmaped window system for Unix, co-creator of UTF-8 character encoding, author of text editor sam and programming environment acme, main author of Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems
• Theo de Raadt - Founding member of NetBSD, founder of OpenBSD and OpenSSH
• Jef Raskin - started the Macintosh project in Apple Computer, designed Canon Cat computer, developed The Humane Environment program
• Eric Raymond - Open Source movement, author of fetchmail
• Dennis Ritchie - C, Unix, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Inferno
• Ron Rivest - co-inventor of the RSA algorithm (the R in the name stands for Rivest)
• Marc J. Rochkind - SCCS, see SCM, SCM History
• Blake Ross - co-author of Mozilla Firefox
• Alessandro Rossini - co-author of ZNF
• Guido van Rossum - Python
• Jeff Rulifson - Lead programmer on the NLS project
• Rusty Russell - Creator of iptables for linux
• Steve Russell - First Lisp interpreter; original Spacewar! graphic computer game.
• Benoit Minisini - Creator of Gambas, a Visual Basic like programming language.

S

• Bob Sabiston - Rotoshop, interpolating rotoscope animation software
• Bill Schelter - GNU Maxima, GNU Common Lisp
• Randal L. Schwartz - Just another Perl hacker
• Emily Short - prolific writer of Interactive fiction and co-developer of Inform version 7
• Ken Silverman - creator of Duke Nukem 3D's graphics engine
• 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
• Matthew Smith - ZX Spectrum games, including Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy
• Santiago Lizardo Oscares - Molins, Jerba, GPGEXT
• Henry Spencer - C News, Regex
• Quentin Stafford-Fraser - author of the original VNC viewer, first Windows VNC server, client program for the first webcam
• Richard Stallman - Emacs, GCC, GDB, founder and pioneer of the GNU Project, terminal-independent 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
• Rich Skrenta, co-founder of the Open Directory Project

T - V

• Andrew Tanenbaum - Minix
• Audrey "Autrijus" Tang - designer of Pugs
• Simon Tatham - NASM, PuTTY
• Larry Tesler - the PUB markup language, the Smalltalk browser, debugger and inspector, and (with Tim Mott) the Gypsy word processor
• Avie Tevanian - author of the Mach kernel
• Ken Thompson - main designer and author of Unix, Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, B and Bon programming languages (precursors of C), inventor of UTF-8 character encoding, introduced regular expressions in QED.
• Michael Tiemann - GCC
• Linus Torvalds - original author and current maintainer of the Linux kernel
• Michael Toy - co-developer of the computer game Rogue
• Roy Trubshaw - MUD - together with Richard Bartle, the father of MUDs
• Andrew Tridgell - Samba, Rsync
• Bob Truel, co-founder of the Open Directory Project
• Wietse Venema - Postfix, SATAN, TCP Wrapper
• Paul Vixie - BIND, Cron

W - Z

• Larry Wall - warp, rn, patch, Perl
• Bob Wallace - author PC-Write word processor; he is considered one of the fathers of shareware
• John Walker, co-founder of Autodesk
• 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)
• David Wheeler - co-inventor of the subroutine; designer of WAKE; co-designer of Tiny Encryption Algorithm, XTEA, Burrows-Wheeler transform. (see http://www.dwheeler.com/dwheeler.html); this refers to several David Wheelers in computing
• Arthur Whitney - A+, K
• Roberta and Ken Williams -- Sierra Entertainment, King's Quest, graphic adventure game
• Dave Winer – developed XML-RPC, Frontier scripting language
• Niklaus Wirth - Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon
• Don Woods - INTERCAL, Colossal Cave Adventure
• Steve Wozniak - Breakout, Apple Integer BASIC, founded Apple Computer (with Steve Jobs)
• Jerry Yang - co-creator of Yahoo!
• Jamie Zawinski - Lucid Emacs, Netscape, Mozilla, XScreenSaver

Computer programmers | Lists of people by occupation

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