Software Development Legends: The Movers and Shakers

Question

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Who in the software world do you admire the most?

As a software engineer, I am pretty interested in the history of computers, programming languages and technology in general. Most of all, I like to read about the advent of algorithms and languages and the reasons behind their creation.

I found the story of the origins of the World Wide Web and Tim Berners-Lee's work at CERN to his visions of the Semantic Web particularly interesting as well as the reasons behind the creation of the C++ language by Bjarne Stroustroup.

As a huge group of talented and experienced developers, I'm sure this will yield some interesting answers and dig up some history.

Which Engineers and Developers do you find to be the most influential and have had a great impact on your career and modern Software Engineering?

Across the board, or in your domain.

Answer 1

Tony Hoare. Invented Quicksort. Manged major software projects at a time when there was very little idea of what they even were. A brilliant, thoughtful and articulate man.

Do yourself a big favor and read his Turing Award Lecture. This wonderful document has changed the way that I think about my relationship to the users of my software.

Answer 2

Steve McConnell. I'm not sure how influential he is among other developers, but for me, after reading his book I completely changed the way I went about writing software and I shall forever be grateful I picked up his book, Code Complete.

EDIT: Oh my gosh, I completely forgot about my Benevolent Dictator for Life, Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python. Python was the first language that made me say, "I love this langauge!" I thoroughly enjoy programming in Python. It's fun.

Answer 3

My High School teacher.

Answer 4

It's not well know that he was a computer scientist at one point in his life, but the architect Christopher Alexander has been a big influence on me. In software, he's best known as the father of design patterns. He elucidated these mainly in terms of building architecture, but also explored the ideas of connectivity and design and software. His more recent work emphasizes the nature of design as process of coevolution and development. That is, things of quality must be grown, grown out of themselves, influence and be influenced by their surroundings. This requires a recognition of the awareness of designed things. All good design must also not only recognize impermanence and imperfection, but draw strength from the organic qualities these create. (See also the Japanese ideals of Mono No Aware and Wabi-Sabi.)

Donald Knuth and Alan Kay are also heros of mine. Stewart Brand, though not a programmer, has also been a major influence on the way I think about software.

Answer 5

Alan Kay. Inventor of the term "object-oriented programming". Coined the phrase "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." His Smalltalk has inspired technology/language design for the last 30 years. Invented the Dynabook, laying the conceptual framework for laptops, notebooks, tablet PCs.

Answer 6

link Anders_Hejlsberg created Turbo Pascal and then Delphi. Since I've been using Delphi since v1 for all my Windows projects, I'd say his work had a direct impact on myself and my career - and my company for that matter - and on those of many, many other developers.

He then went on and was the lead engineer for C#... impacting even more developers!

Answer 7

John Carmack for his influence on games and 3D graphics:

• John D. Carmack wikipedia page

Answer 8

Alan Turing for inventing the Universal Turing Machine in 1936

Answer 9

Steven List a.k.a. Doc is someone I've been reading about for a while and has helped in those areas where one has to deal with people and process rather than just code.

Answer 10

David Heinemeier Hansson has had a huge impact on how I do web development (creator of Ruby on Rails framework) and also has had a huge impact on my thoughts on developing a software company.

Answer 11

Michael Widenius for creating the MySQL database

Answer 12

These 2 guys (Dennis Ritchie & Ken Thompson), as they started the language and OS I use the most. Some C history , some unix history.