Top 10 Programmers of All Time

June 25th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

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I was discussing with a friend recently who I thought were the most influential programmers of all time. My own experience is heavily rooted within the games industry because of my 10 years working in it so my list includes some industry heavy weights. I am sure people will disagree with my ordering and who I have included but I would love to hear what your top 10 would be.

1. John Carmack
John is the god of programmers. He has consistently pushed back the barriers of the fastest paced industry in the world. To keep ahead of the wave whilst still working under the pressure of having to make the final result part of a game is awesome. His innovation in computer graphics have brought us Wolfenstein 3D, Doom & Quake.

2. Linus Torvalds
Linus invented Linux. He wanted to create a Unix-like operating system for the PC and in doing so created a revolution in open source software.

3. Tim Berners-Lee
Inventor of the World Wide Web has got to be in my top 10 because of the massive difference he has made to the face of the internet.

4. Douglas Andrew Bel
Doug wrote one of my all time favorite games Dungeon Master At the time it was a massive leap forward in role playing games and although graphics have improved over the years thousands of games still copy the inventory system from 1987.

5. Dennis Ritchie
Dennis has had his fingers in many wonderful pies these include C, ALTRAN, B, BCPL and Unix. For me his work with C has been the most influential and the C book The C Programming Language by Dennis and Brian Kernighan is one of the best programming books ever written.

6. Bram Cohen
Bram wrote the protocol BitTorrent that allows file sharing. For me Bram made one of those leaps of imagination required to create a system that is now used in every corner of the internet.

7. Rasmus Lerdorf, Andi Gutmans & Zeev Suraski
PHP currently runs 34% of the websites on the internet. Need I say more?

8. Jez San
Jez is probably most known for his company Argonaut (I was it’s 8th employee) but Jez also coded some of the early games and throughout his career continued to be actively involved in the programming and could always surprise everyone with his in-depth knowledge of cutting edge technologies.

9. Bjarne Stroustrup
Bjarne invented C++ wrote its early definitions and produced its first ever implementation. Where would we be without the massive leap from C to C++.

10. Richard Bartle & Roy Trubshaw
Together they wrote the very first massive multiplayer online game. The first MUD (Multi-user dungeon) was written at the University of Essex and allowed users to interact through a text based interface.

UPDATE:
For all of those who disagree with this list I have add a poll for everyone to vote for the most influential programmer of all time.

There Are 87 Responses So Far. »

  1. Pingback by University Update - Linux - Top 10 Programmers of All Time on 25 June 2007:

    [...] Link to Article linux Top 10 Programmers of All Time » Posted at The Programming and [...]

  2. Comment by Logan Buesching on 26 June 2007:

    Your links for Rasmus and Andi are backwards.

    Why not zeev?

  3. Comment by Nick Halstead on 26 June 2007:

    Logan, your right, I had the links mixed up and poor old Zeev got left out. Fixed now.

  4. Comment by Picky git. on 26 June 2007:

    and on #3 you spell Tim Berners Lee incorrrectly.

  5. Comment by Nick Halstead on 26 June 2007:

    Thanks Picky, fixed.. Sorry Sir Tim.

  6. Comment by David Finley on 26 June 2007:

    What about Grace Hopper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_hopper)? She was a pioneering programmer, one of the originators of the Compiler, as well as probably the only programmer with a warship (USS Hopper, DDG-70) named after her. Not to mention she was the first programmer to report a “Bug”!

  7. Comment by Nick Halstead on 26 June 2007:

    There are hundreds too choose from and it is not easy to compare as we only know the basic information about each one. Do we judge the people such as Grace as better because they came up with a new concept? vs more modern day famous programmers who are working with much more complex technologies.

    Although being named after a Warship sounds great! Although I do have a military defence location named after me. Fort Halstead in the UK is a centre of designing of new explosive technologies.

  8. Comment by boxlight on 26 June 2007:

    This is a very flawed list. Linus is #2 and there’s no Steve Wozniak on the list. And no Bill Gates, no Paul Allen. What a crock.

    Linus did what? Wrote a free knock off of a unix kernel then let millions of others add on to that code.

    Woz only *invented* the personal computer — wrote the Apple II OS, video drivers, floppy controllers, not to mention a BASIC compiler, and a tonne of other stuff.

  9. Comment by Nick Halstead on 26 June 2007:

    Bill Gates a programmer? oh please get a life, he may understand technology but I would not let him near a for-next loop. Paul as another microsoft founder rules himself out for creating the worst designed operating system ever.

    Just my personal opinion, but the list is about programming talent not about their ability to leaverage their work. If it was about taking advantage of other peoples talents then Bill would certainly be top of the list.

  10. Comment by kodeninja on 26 June 2007:

    Richard Stallman definitely needs to be on this list. I mean he wrote the GCC/GDB/GNU Emacs and a lotta other GPL stuff which is extensively used on almost all Linux flavors!

  11. Comment by kodeninja on 26 June 2007:

    I would also add Joshua Bloch of Google to this list. The awesome and beautifully designed Collections API is easily the MOST heavily used one by any Java programmer. Moreover his other work on the Java language, including Generics and other stuff is also gr8.

  12. Comment by Carl on 26 June 2007:

    Nick, you’re on crack.

    I certainly wouldn’t consider the guys behind PHP/Zend to be talented programmers, and certainly not in the top 10 (or 12) in the World.

    And Gates and Allen are fairly widely known for writing an Altair emulator, and then a BASIC interpreter on top of it because they didn’t have access to an Altair themselves. I won’t ruin the fun of you finding all the referenences yourself, but start by Googling for “Could Bill Gates Write Code? Yes He Bloody Could”.

  13. Comment by Mike on 26 June 2007:

    I think Anders Hejlsberg is missing, the father of TurboPascal, Delphi and C#. He had and has a strong influence on the way software is developed (at least for the Windows world).

  14. Comment by RubyMan on 26 June 2007:

    Hi,

    How can you missout a great developer of RUBY. Yes I am talking about MATZ.

    Change the title and make it Great Eleven Team. Or Just like the movie Dirty Dozen, add one more programmer and give as ” Dynamic Dozens ”

    MATZ cannot be avaoided for its great contribution.

  15. Comment by sam fisher on 26 June 2007:

    Like all lists this one is flawed by default… i can add 25 more programmers that have had as much if not more influence than the ones you listed ;)

  16. Comment by Nick Halstead on 26 June 2007:

    Of course its flawed, its just something I made up based upon the kind of coding I like. The top 10 can be sliced many many ways.

    Carl, The PHP Guys have written a programming language which was extremely accessible (and still is) that is used by millions upon millions of website they deserve every credit they get. Ok, so Bill can code but I still dont forgive him for the bloody ‘message pump’ concept!

    RubyMan, I missed out MATZ because Ruby although lovely is only getting attention because of Rails. And Rails is going through a ‘trend’ lets give it another 5 years to see if it sticks and then he can go on the list.

    So who invented BASIC originally?

  17. Comment by Carl on 26 June 2007:

    You seem to be confusing talent and influence throughout this page. I take your point that PHP is extremely successful, and the guys behind it should be credited for that, but to put them in a list of the “Top 10 Programmers Of All Time” is a stretch.

    And as for your question of who invented BASIC originally - John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. (I cheated and Wikipedied that.)

    Oh, and one glaring omission is Donald Knuth, surely he must be fighting for #1?

  18. Comment by Nick Halstead on 26 June 2007:

    Carl, I have never read ‘The Art of Computer Programming’ so cannot really comment on Donald. But Wikipedia does have a lot to say about him. This is the problem that we do not have enough ‘awards’ and the like to praise the work of great programmers. I have worked with some of the best in the games industry but if you ‘Google’ Colin Reid you get nothing? What has he done? Well after leaving Argonaut he went on to work for Nintendo bringing us classics like Metroid Prime. He also worked on the last 3 Zelda’s. (BTW Hello Colin if your reading this)

  19. Comment by anon on 26 June 2007:

    so old and not so cool …. your post made me yawn

  20. Comment by Captain Hook on 26 June 2007:

    - Alan Turing
    - Donald Knuth
    - Ken Thompson
    - Dennis Ritchie
    - Allan Kay
    - Woz
    - Bill Joy
    - Linus Torvalds
    - James Gosling
    - Anders Hejlsberg

  21. Comment by opensourcereader on 26 June 2007:

    Jürgen Holler of the spring fame for the cleaness of the vast code he produces, and how he can communicate about the code.
    Steve Wozniak for being a complete hardware and software genius.

  22. Comment by some_news on 26 June 2007:

    where is Turing ?

  23. Comment by Pedro on 26 June 2007:

    Alan Curtis Kay : Smalltalk designer, also known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming he is also considered by some as the architect of the modern windowing graphical user interface . He is the conceiver of the Dynabook concept which defined the basics of the laptop computer and the tablet computer

    Smalltalk is the most influencial language/framework in the history of computer science.

    - Lisa (apple), was inspired by smalltalk
    - Unit Testing
    - Extreme rpogramming
    . Virtual machines implementation
    - image paradigm
    - fully reflective languge.
    - IDE concept
    -

  24. Comment by Sam Griffith Jr. on 26 June 2007:

    John McCarthy - inventor of LISP, the single most powerful development tool ever created.

  25. Comment by Larry Klug on 27 June 2007:

    Jamie Zawinski (JWZ) - Mosaic\Netscape\Mozilla, Lucid\Gnu\Xemacs, XScreenSaver, XDaliClock…

  26. Comment by OJ on 27 June 2007:

    For me Bram made one of those leaps of imagination required to create a system that is now used in every corner of the internet.

    This is interesting. Coming up with the idea of the system is definitely impressive, coding it isn’t that hard. I’m not saying that Bram Cohen isn’t a good programmer (because he clearly is), but coming up with BitTorrent doesn’t make him one of the top ten. IMHO :)

  27. Comment by Foo on 27 June 2007:

    I think you are out of your league on this one. Study computer science at all and that list will change drastically.

    I like how you add PHP, citing percentages as a reason for adding the authors, yet don’t add Gates even though the percentages on his work would dwarf PHP. Nice.

    Others have pointed out glaring omissions. This list should have been called “I’m young and here’s who I think are, like, the coolest programmers”.

  28. Comment by RussianGeek on 27 June 2007:

    In 10 years he would be added to the list.

  29. Comment by SEO Expert Blog on 27 June 2007:

    I miss Larry Wall on this list.

  30. Comment by Soltys on 27 June 2007:

    @SEO Expert Blog

    Larry Wall is VERY important person in programers area.

  31. Comment by mcv on 27 June 2007:

    PHP? PHP is the worst programming language I ever learned. How can You put PHP developers into top 10?

  32. Comment by Nick Halstead on 27 June 2007:

    mcv, you really are in the WRONG place if that is what you think of PHP. And it shows you did not learn anything.

  33. Comment by mcv on 27 June 2007:

    Bzzt, WRONG. My opinion about PHP is in the context of your post entitled ‘Top 10 programmers of all time’. I don’t know any language with such a mess in std. functions naming convention, and illogical grammar. Why do you think then PHP’s authors are one of the best programmers of all time? You should put them into ‘Top 10… well, maybe lucky dogs of all time’.

    BTW have you ever write in Python/DJango or Ruby/Rails? Then give them a try.

  34. Comment by dave on 28 June 2007:

    i think that rather than just looking at the people, you oughta also consider the teams - for example, yeah alan kay is a genius - but what about hillis and the rest of his crew? so in that regard, i’d think about:

    unix (all original dudes)
    mach (all from rashid and tevanian to the others at cmu)
    mips (hansen and crew)
    all of the original floating point pioneers
    bsd team (all original before forks in early 90’s)
    kurt akeley and the whole opengl movement
    barrett and all original intel folks
    cray originals
    jim gray, tandem and tons of dbase geniuses
    grady booch and uml folks
    gosling and java…
    tons of standards geniuses too (from wireless pioneers to networking applications and so on)

    …and this list could go on and on and on and on…there were individual dudes and super smart teams

  35. Comment by Mike Malone on 28 June 2007:

    I’d add Donald Knuth and Larry Wall for sure. I’d probably remove Tim Berners-Lee from the list, I don’t _really_ consider him a programmer. Plus, a lot of his success has been by accident (by his own admission). That’s not to say he isn’t a genius and someone we all owe a lot of respect to, I just don’t consider him a “great programmer.”

    One addition I would make that no one has noted yet: W. Richard Stevens. Author of Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment and the Unix Network Programming series, he was an amazing programmer and one of the best tech writers of all time.

  36. Comment by Omar Aguirre on 28 June 2007:

    I think you should take a really close look at Miguel De Icaza, I’m sure a lot of people would put him in the top 10

  37. Comment by as on 1 July 2007:

    where is richard stallman¿
    stallman should be the first of the list…

  38. Trackback by www.enchilame.com on 1 July 2007:

    Top 10: Los mejores Programadores…

    John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, Douglas Andrew Bell, Dennis Ritchie, Bram Cohen, Rasmus Lerdorf, Jez San, Bjarne Stroustrup y Richard Bartle. Cual falta, o cual sobra?…

  39. Comment by Paco on 1 July 2007:

    It woths to mention:
    David Cutler, maker of the only alternative to Unix
    Donald Knuth & Leslie Lamport, for TeX and LaTeX, metafont…
    Miguel De Icaza for Gnome, Mono, F-spot
    Ada Lovelace (the first programmer ever)

  40. Comment by Leonardo Tadei on 1 July 2007:

    Sobran creadores de juegos, y faltan esos programadores que hacen que el estado del arte evoluciones realmente. Se menciona arriba la omisión de Richard Stallman, pero también se echa de menos a los creadores del TCP/IP, de la interfaz gráfica de usuario, de las bases de datos relacionales, de la criptografía de curva eléptica por nombrar solo algunos.

  41. Comment by fandsi on 1 July 2007:

    James Gosling

  42. Comment by someone on 1 July 2007:

    forget gamming and lets do serious list …

  43. Comment by Demon on 1 July 2007:

    Where is Larry Wall and Knuth ???

  44. Comment by Demon on 1 July 2007:

    Thompson wrote a entire unix shell in one night … he deserves to be here..

    - Larry Wall
    - Thompson
    - Ritchie
    - Knuth
    - Bill Joy
    - Stallman

  45. Comment by rumoreador on 1 July 2007:

    dONT FORget bill gates!!!!

  46. Comment by Igor on 1 July 2007:

    Bill Gates??? WTF

    Hey not only game programming is important… it is but no so important, how about the James the Java creator? how about Miguel de Icaza(Gnome)?.

    And PHP… it’s not so great, because it has problems, so it’s not well coded.

    How about the MACosX creators? the .NET developers?

  47. Comment by Max on 2 July 2007:

    Miguel de Icaza is missing

  48. Comment by omar on 2 July 2007:

    miguel de icaza Gnome/gnumeric/mono

  49. Comment by masterLoki on 2 July 2007:

    You really need to put Richard Stallman on this list

  50. Comment by q on 2 July 2007:

    Rob Pike? Plan 9, UTF, Sam.
    Ken Thompson? This top-ten is bullshit.

  51. Comment by Aky on 2 July 2007:

    Where is Andrew S. Tanenbaum?

  52. Comment by Elvis Enmanuel on 2 July 2007:

    Paul Nettle!!!!

  53. Comment by txipi on 2 July 2007:

    Where is Edsger W. Dijkstra? A big miss! :-(

  54. Comment by MrCummin on 2 July 2007:

    I think that there are several programmers, that despite being very important and influential, they are not enough to be in the top 10 list.

    On the other hand, there are many great computer scientists left in that list, some of them being a Turing award, such as Dijkstra or Kuth, who should be in that list. I also consider that, if some free software programmer must be in that list, it must be Richard Stallman for his great contribution in many topics. Linus is great, but Stallman was a pioneer.

  55. Comment by Jesús Aneiros Sosa on 2 July 2007:

    Definitivamente cualquiera puede hacer una lista de los 10 programadores más influyentes, el problema es que la misma valga 10 centavos!

    Colocar a Denis Ritchie en la lista y olvidar a Ken Thompson demuestra una completa ignorancia del tema.

    Pero por qué no remitirse sencillamente al premio Turing como un modesto comienzo? [1]

    [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award

  56. Comment by Rodolfo on 3 July 2007:

    Hello,

    Missed Gary Kildall, creator of the CP/M Operating system, among other things. One of the computer entrepeneurs.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall

  57. Comment by txen on 3 July 2007:

    We can’t forgive a great programmer like Michael Abrash

  58. Pingback by The Programming and Management Blog » Top 10 Programmers of All Time - POLL on 3 July 2007:

    [...] new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! My recent post about the Top 10 Programmers of All Time showed that everyone has very strong opinions on the subject. My original list was based upon my [...]

  59. Comment by admin on 3 July 2007:

    I have now put up a POLL for everyone to vote on to sort this out :)

    http://blog.assembleron.com/2007/07/03/top-10-programmers-of-all-time-poll/

  60. Comment by Jez San on 14 July 2007:

    im flattered and honoured that you considered me one of the top 10 most influential programmers of all time, but i too think there should be a lot more people ahead of me on the list. if i made the top 1000 i’d still be pleased… and anyway, i stopped programming long ago (and miss it). Thanks for thinking of me. Hope you’re well, its been a long time. — Jez

  61. Comment by Rod on 13 August 2007:

    how about Richard M. Stallman, huh!?

  62. Comment by Danger on 17 August 2007:

    You forgot me !

  63. Comment by jota on 11 October 2007:

    Hello everybody
    I don’t know anything about computer proggraming but it sounds interesting
    I have take it as a career option if i go back to college
    If some of you guys could give give me information about how is a regular day in the life of a computer proggramer, what are the skills one should have before start, work prospects, and any information you think will be useful will be really appreciate.
    To be honest what some people have told me is that computer proggramers don’t hav e a life that they are sitting in front of a computer 24/7, they get obsolete very easy, that they don’t make as much money, that they all are like genius but far from society, and some other stuff that to be honest i don’t think they are true.
    Any ways..i want to hear from some of you
    Thanks in advance for any information

  64. Comment by jota on 11 October 2007:

    Hi Jez San
    Why did you stop proggraming?

  65. Pingback by Programadores : Los Top 10 de Todos los Tiempos | Código limpio on 7 November 2007:

    [...] fuente (ingles) : blog.assembleron.com [...]

  66. Comment by Kevin on 19 November 2007:

    Why does the name of David Heinemeier Hansson, Adele Goldberg & Brian Behlendorf not there ?

  67. Comment by John on 8 December 2007:

    Anders Hejlsberg should be on this list.
    He is the creator of several popular languages, such as C#, Delphi and Turbo Pascal.

  68. Comment by William Wilgus on 1 January 2008:

    The C Programming Language is the most important programming book ever written? No, it’s the first of the confusing. I give you just two examples: L-value (an address), and R-value (a reference). The C++ literature is even worse, of course: prototype (abstract declaration), etc. Of course, the worse is OOP. Bjorn had it right when he first named C++ as `C with Classes’, for that’s what the `objects’ in OOP really are: classes. But then, OOP is poop.

  69. Comment by you on 8 January 2008:

    Where’s Bill Joy?

  70. Comment by Federico Cargnelutti on 19 January 2008:

    Great list, although Richard Stallman and Anders Hejlsberg are missing.

    Also, Steven McConnell, Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds are considered to be the most influential people in the software industry. Being the best programmer is not just knowing the syntax of a language, is also using it to influence other people and technologies.

    About the PHP discussion. Lets don’t forget that PHP is a programming language that began as a hobby and became the most popular language on the Internet. It manage to out-compete the biggest companies in the software industry, like Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. So damn right Rasmus, Andi and Zeev have to be on that list, they won the battle for middleware. On the other hand, PHP does not compete with Python or Ruby. They are both great programming languages, but they are use for different things (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_languages).

    The only specialized languages for Web Development today are PHP and ColdFusion.

    Happy coding everyone!

  71. Comment by justin flavin on 14 April 2008:

    Richard Stallman and Rob Pike definitely need to be on that list.

    Pike would be my number 1 - mainly because he not only helped develop Unix itself, but went on to out-Unix Unix with the awesome Plan 9 os.

    Pike is now the Principal Engineer at Google.

  72. Comment by justin flavin on 14 April 2008:

    however , on second thoughts - a lot of names mentioned above could be classed as “influential programmers”.

    having thought about it , and thought about who would THE BEST programmers ever, my money would be on Tim and Chris Stamper of Ultimate Play the Game. What they managed to squeeze out of a Z80 chip , assembly language and only 40k to play with was simply incredible.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Play_The_Game

  73. Comment by knhacker73 on 11 June 2008:

    PAUL GRAHAM. HE IS ONE OF THE GREATEST THINKERS OF OUR TIME AND A GREAT PROGRAMMER

  74. Comment by knhacker73 on 11 June 2008:

    KNUTH AND DON KNUTH, WHAT DO I SAY?

  75. Comment by Spread Betting Brokers on 24 June 2008:

    I think Justin Flavin has a very valid point indeed

  76. Comment by Paul Bryan Cipriano on 25 June 2008:

    for me Mr. Paul Bryan Cipriano he is the one who originally develop robotics and dennis ritchie is not the developer of the C programming he is only the one who introduce the C programming in the market the real developer is Paul Bryan cipriano..

  77. Comment by Norm on 1 July 2008:

    I cant believe those stinkin’ hippies licking the balls of the great master of stinkin’ hippies, Richard Stallman. This guy is just a plain, dirty, pothead hippie - nothing more. I want to see proof that he wrote something that was effectively used/distributed with any version of gcc. And dont start the EMACS apology. That thing stinks too.

  78. Comment by bobongbata on 18 July 2008:

    pffff…. i dont think number 1 and to should be there..

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  85. Comment by rambo on 23 August 2008:

    im the best coder alive

  86. Comment by God on 29 August 2008:

    I am the best coder alive. I code the human DNA and the entire universe. Period. I am the best of the best. HaHaHa.

  87. Comment by Gatsen Tjirare on 3 October 2008:

    Sorry dudes
    I couldnt help but interfere here coz we’re missing the key point required to select the best programmer of all time. We need the “CRITERIA” that should be taken into account before selecting someone.I believe that mainly we need to look for talent,someone who created master pieces that was loved across the world. Secondly we might want to look at influence, someone who wrote code that changed the world and the way things work. Someone who used software to drive the world forward to were we are today.We might want to consider “consistency” also, was it just a momentary flash of brilliance or has the legacy lasted or still is? Having considered the above mentioned, I in my opinion will say Bill Gates deserves the title. He is the “CODEMASTER”! Your opinions are welcome!

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