Which guru would you interview in a virtual bonus chapter of "coders at work" book?

Question

I've really enjoyed reading Peter Siebel's Coders at work book. At the end of the last chapter (Don Knuth), i tought that the interviews selection was good but a little bit too old-school oriented.

So, in your virtual 16th chapter, which guru would you interview? In my 16th chapter, i would be amazed to read an interview of John Carmack.

Please, link your interviewee to some web reference (ex:wikipedia) when is possible.

Answer 1

Lady Ada Lovelace. Now that is old school.

Think about it: not only did she write the first ever computer program, but although it was only written to the specs for the machine, it was actually bug free! That's a feat that hasn't been repeated too many times since.

Answer 2

Konrad Zuse, without a doubt.

Answer 3

This one dude who helped me at Best Buy because he knew, like, everything

Answer 4

Don't forget Programmers At Work by Susan Lammers written in 1986, it makes an interesting "prequel" to Coders At Work.

• Charles Simonyi, Microsoft
• Butler Lampson, Xerox PARC labs
• John Warnock, Adobe
• Gary Kildall, Digital Research (CP/M)
• Bill Gates, Micro-Soft BASIC
• John Page, Software Publishing Company (SPC)
• C. Wayne Ratliff, Ashton-Tate dBASE, JPL
• Dan Bricklin, VisiCalc
• Bob Frankston, VisiCalc
• Jonathan Sachs, Lotus 1-2-3
• Ray Ozzie, Lotus Notes
• Peter Roizen, T/Maker a spreadsheet program
• Bob Carr, Xerox PARC Labs, Aston-Tate
• Jef Raskin, Apple Macintosh
• Andy Hertzfeld, Apple Macintosh programmer
• Tōru Itawtani, Pac-Man
• Scott Kim, Xerox PARC Labs, book Inversions
• Jaron Lanier, Atari, Visual Programming Languages
• Michael Hawley, LucasFilm

Answer 5

This guy: Jim Stankey.

Answer 6

J.B. Rainsberger, for his ongoing contributions to agile software development.

Answer 7

Jon Skeet would be a new face.

Answer 8

Jon Skeet. Oh wait, Hanselman already did that.

Answer 9

• Fred Brooks (IBM OS/360, Mythical Man-Month)
• Jon Bentley (Programming Pearls)
• Dennis Richie (Bell Labs, C, Unix),
• Gary Hendrix (Symantec)
• Peter Szor (Symantec's chief antivirus researcher)
• Bill Pate (NASA, on-board shuttle group)
• Tom Jennings (FidoNet)
• Gabe Newell (Valve, Microsoft, Quake, Half-Life)
• Michael Abrash (assembly "guru")
• Mark Russinovich (SysInternals)
• and the developer who created Clippy, Microsoft's favourite AI-bot.