Top 10 Programmers of All Time - POLL

July 3rd, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

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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 programming background and was purely my own opinion and I did not expect everyone to agree with it. What I thought I would do this time round was to give everyone a chance to voice their opinion. I have installed Democracy which is a great wordPress plugin for performing online polls. I have pre-filled 18 programmers from my original list plus those that were suggested in the comments. You can also add your own suggestions but please only make them sensible and if you need some inspiration wikipedia has a good list. I will run the poll until the end of the month and then announce the overall winner.

UPDATE: It has now been a month so I have closed the poll and posted the results

There Are 33 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by Paco on 3 July 2007:

    Turing was a very important person in computer science but he wasn’t a programmer!

  2. Comment by Matt on 3 July 2007:

    Steve Wozniak? Sure he was a hardware guy, but he could write machine code/assembly like no other.

  3. Comment by Eric on 4 July 2007:

    Turing was a very important person in computer science but he wasn’t a programmer!

    You’re right in that he is not generally remembered as a programmer but, when he developed the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) he also created the Abbreviated Computer Instructions which was an entire programming language to run on the machine. He also wrote the Programmers’ Handbook (2nd Edition) for the Manchester Electronic Computer Mark II and wrote one of the first computer programs to play chess.

  4. Comment by DOOOMKULTUS on 4 July 2007:

    Dennis Ritchie & Ken Thompson for C.The most influential programming language till date, imo

  5. Comment by Stephan Schmidt on 4 July 2007:

    One would surely think of Ada Lovelace.

    Peace
    -stephan
    –
    Stephan Schmidt :: stephan@reposita.org
    Reposita Open Source - Monitor your software development
    http://www.reposita.org
    Blog at http://stephan.reposita.org - No signal. No noise.

  6. Comment by Inferno on 4 July 2007:

    Bill Gates doesnt belong here, he is not a programmer,he is thief.

  7. Comment by fauigerzigerk on 4 July 2007:

    The inventor of the web (Tim Berners-Lee) and the inventor of one recently fashionable web framework (DHH) get the same number of votes at this time. I guess this goes a long way to show how utterly meaningless this kind of poll is.

  8. Comment by aurelije on 4 July 2007:

    Grace Hopper for FLOW-MATIC first English like-language, and first bug. And she is a lady :)

  9. Comment by r_pt on 4 July 2007:

    What about Ivan Sutherland and Douglas Engelbart ??

  10. Comment by Umar on 4 July 2007:

    John Carmack is my hero ^_^

  11. Comment by Erik on 4 July 2007:

    Who is the most influential programmer in the world?

    Influential in what way?

    I think money buys allot of influence in this world.

  12. Comment by Computer Guy on 4 July 2007:

    Who influenced who? If Linus was influenced by someone who came before, then they “reverse inherit” the influence that their disciple created. Therefore Linus is not influential. In this case, he is influenced by the inventors of UNIX:

    “Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy.”

    By definition, Dennis Rithie is then more influential than Linus. In fact, Linus didn’t create a new original idea (as a whole). Much of Linux is just copied from elsewhere. (Take slab memory allocation for example.)

    What are the original and fundamental advancements to computer science coming from people on this list?

    Alan Kay - Coined the term OOP.
    Turing - Invented the concept of a turing machine.
    Stallman - Wrote gcc, which is a prerequisite to Linux BTW.

    We can all sit around and feel good about Linux but in many ways it’s not innovative and it’s not influential. It is, rather, being influenced by what came before and what’s happening elsewhere.

    Next question? Who’s influence has been most destructive?
    Answer: Bill Gates

  13. Comment by J.O. on 4 July 2007:

    But the most productive error-free code producer ever is Macro Lisp.

  14. Comment by Steve on 4 July 2007:

    To be honest, and this is something that a lot of people might disagree with, Microsoft has perhaps influenced the world of computing more than any other group/company. They are in most homes, companies and governments, more so than Linux is.

    So, as much as it pains me, Bill Gates gets my vote, simply because he has influenced the world so much.

  15. Pingback by developercast.com » Nick Halstead’s Blog: Poll - Top 10 Programmers of All Time on 4 July 2007:

    [...] Halstead is conducting a poll of his own to try to figure out who the online community thinks are the “Top 10 Programmers [...]

  16. Comment by Kelvin Westlake on 4 July 2007:

    Please add David Braben, the guys is a living legend http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Braben and developer of the most epic games of our time (Elite, Frontier etc).

  17. Comment by Nick Halstead on 4 July 2007:

    I have met David a few times during my time in the games industry and he certainly deserves his place up there with the other programming greats. The original elite was coding wonder, it still amazes me now that not only did he make a 3d space combat game he then added in all the other features that were not matched for many years all within the space of 4k (the bbc micro had 32k ram but most of this was used up by video ram.)

  18. Comment by Joakim Nygård on 4 July 2007:

    I am quite sure Steve Ballmer is not a programmer. The wiki page mentions nothing of the kind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer) nor does Microsofts bio (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/steve/default.mspx).

  19. Comment by admin on 5 July 2007:

    I have done a bit of cleaning up of the list as some odd entries had been added, I also note that I have received 4 votes?? which puts me alongside Joel Spolsky which very flattering is not very likely. Although I welcome any offers from publishers to turn my jibberish posts into a book (you better have a good editor!)

  20. Comment by Thomas Hansen on 6 July 2007:

    Nice one, though obviously utterly completely useless…

    Everybody knows that if you look at programming Kristen, Donald and Ritchie is by far the most important people to the industry and to some extent maybe Bjarne and Andres…

    All this list says is how many completely ignorant people there exists in this world which believes they have opinions about stuff they should have had laws against that the opinion had opinions about… ;)

    .t

  21. Comment by jay on 11 July 2007:

    @Computer Guy - using your logic the answer would have to be the “The big bang” or “god” depending on your views. It’s a stupid way figuring out who is the best.

  22. Comment by jose on 12 July 2007:

    Linus is great!

  23. Comment by geronimo on 13 July 2007:

    How is that Richard Stallman is listed twice ?

  24. Comment by FelhoBacsi on 15 July 2007:

    I think this list is very, very imperfect. (Tom Lane, Damian Conway, David Heinemeier Hanssen, Brian “Krow” Aker, Martin Fowler, GoF, Tom Kyte, Joe Celko, George Schlossnagle………………………………………….)

  25. Comment by php on 17 July 2007:

    I don’t know anybody :D

  26. Comment by Eimantas on 25 July 2007:

    Ha! Linus Toarvalds? Lol… one can think that only linux geeks come to this blog .)
    think of Dennis Richie. With no C there would be no Linux/Windows and neither any other developer would have a tool to do his/her job.

  27. Comment by Stephen Bradley on 3 August 2007:

    Richard Stallman: developed gcc and EMACS

    Bill Joy: main developer of BSD Unix and, I think, wrote its TCP/IP stack

    Guy Steele: developed Scheme

    Dennis Ritchie: developed C

    Ken Thompson: main developer of Unix at Bell Labs

    Donald Knuth: developed TeX (excuse the X for a chi) in addition to writing the bible

    John Backus: led the team that developed the first FORTRAN compiler, proving that code could rival hand-written assembly code

    Mark Andreessen: designed Mosaic
    Eric Bina: programmed Mosaic

    E.F. Cobb: a mathematician rather than a programmer, but deserves recognition for his paper on relational algebra for databases
    Don Chamberlin: main developer (at IBM, I think) of the database programming language that became SQL

  28. Comment by aurelije on 4 August 2007:

    Cobb is Codd

  29. Comment by Stephen Bradley on 6 August 2007:

    Cobb is indeed Codd. Don’t know what I was thinking. Thanks.

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  31. Comment by jimd on 3 January 2008:

    Grace Hopper the inventor of COBOL.

  32. Comment by Norm on 1 July 2008:

    I cant believe those stinkin’ hippies STILL KEEP 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.

  33. Comment by Accountants in Leeds on 1 July 2008:

    Steve Wozniak is the man! A lot of us are here today because of his great mind!

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