20 Greatest Computer Programmers Of All Time

Computers are very complex machines, yet people operate them without any technical skills. They just interact with the graphical interface, without knowing what’s going in the background.

Well, every element you see on your device is created by a developer. But who are these people exactly?

Nowadays, programmers are considered new rock stars. Below, we have mentioned some world-class coders who have changed the world with their creative minds and influenced people to become a better programmer.

20. David Patterson

Who is he: David Patterson is a computer scientist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

What he has done: Patterson is known for his contribution to the RISC processor (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) design, and his research on RAID (Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks) and NOW (Network of Workstations).

Achievements: He received the Eckert–Mauchly Award, Karl Karlstrom, Outstanding Educator, and ACM Distinguished Service Award.

19. John Carmack

Who is he: John Carmack is a game developer and co-founder and former technical director of Id Software.

What he has done: He was the lead programmer of the Id video games Doom, Rage, Commander Keen, and their sequels. He is best known for his innovations in 3d graphics, especially for Reverse algorithm for shadow volumes. Carmack popularized the use of several techniques in computer graphics such as adaptive tile refresh, binary space partitioning, raycasting, surface caching, and MegaTexture technology.

Achievements: He was honored by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (twice), the Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards and Game Developers Conference Lifetime Achievement award for his pioneering work.

Read: 13 Most Influential and Famous Video Game Designers

18. Donald Ervin Knuth

Who is he: Donald Knuth is a mathematician, computer scientist, and the author of The Art of Computer Programming. He has been called the father of the analysis of algorithms.

What he has done: Donald Knuth worked on the development of analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and its formal mathematical techniques. He popularized the term asymptotic notation. He created the TeX computer typesetting system, WEB, and CWEB computer programming systems to encourage literate programming.

Achievements: Turing Award, Grace Murray Hopper Award, National Medal of Science, Faraday Medal, Kyoto Prize, and John von Neumann Medal.

17. Guido van Rossum

Who is he: Guido van Rossum is a computer programmer, known as the author of the Python programming language.

What he has done: In the early days, he wrote a glob() routine to BSD Unix and worked on ABC programming language. He developed Python while working for Google and continues to oversee the Python development process, making essential decisions where necessary.

Achievements: Rossum received an NLUUG Award the 2001 Award for the Advancement of Free Software for his work on Python.

16. James Arthur Gosling

Who is he: James Gosling is a Canadian computer scientist, known as the father of the Java programming language.

What he has done: James developed a multi-processor version of Unix, several compilers, and mail systems before joining Sun Microsystems. He invented the Java programming language and implemented Java’s original compiler and virtual machine in 1994. He also made contributions to several other software systems, including Gosling Emacs and NeWS.

Major Achievements: Gosling was awarded The Economist Innovation Award,  IEEE John von Neumann Medal, and he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2007.

15. Niklaus Wirth

Who is he: Niklaus Wirth is a Swiss computer scientist who was made a fellow of the Computer History Museum for his influential work in algorithms and programming languages.

What he has done: Wirth is known for developing numerous programming languages, including Pascal, Modula, as well as for establishing several standard topics in the software engineering field. He was the chief designer of Algol W, Euler, Modula, Modula-2, Pascal, Oberon, Oberon-2, and Oberon-7. He also worked on Lola digital hardware design and simulation system.

Achievements: He was honored with Turing Award, SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award, and Marcel Benoist Prize.

14. Alan Curtis Kay

Who is he: Alan Curtis Kay is a computer scientist who has been elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of Arts.

What he has done: Alan is best known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing Graphical User Interface (GUI) design. Brian is also the coiner of phase: The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Major Achievements: Alan received ACM Turing Award for his work on object-oriented programming, UPE Abacus Award, and UdK 01-Award  for pioneering the GUI.

13. John McCarthy

Who is he: John McCarthy was a cognitive scientist and computer scientist, who coined the term Artificial Intelligence.

What he has done: John developed the Lisp programming language family, popularized timesharing, and worked on the design of the ALGOL programming language. He invented the Garbage Collection method to solve the problem of Lisp, which later became the programming language of choice for AI applications.

Major Achievements: He was honored with the Turing Award, Kyoto Prize, National Medal of Science, Computer Pioneer Award, and IJCAI Award for Research Excellence.

12. Thomas Eugene Kurtz

John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz in 1946 | Credit: Dartmouth College Library

Who is he: Thomas Kurtz is a computer scientist and a retired Dartmouth professor who implemented the concept of Timesharing.

What he has done: He developed the BASIC programming language to allow non-experts users to interact with the computer. He and John Kemeny co-founded the company called True BASIC, Inc to market True BASIC, which is an updated version of the language. This programming language became widespread on microcomputers, which allowed small developers and business owners to develop custom software on computers, all on their own.

Major Achievements: Kurtz was honored with AFIPS Pioneer Award and IEEE Computer Science Pioneer Award.

11. John George Kemeny

Credit: Dartmouth College Library

Who is he: John Kemeny is a computer scientist, mathematician, and educator best known for developing BASIC programming language with Thomas Kurtz.

What he has done: Kemeny pioneered the use of computers for ordinary people. He invented BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language in 1964, after experiments with the LGP-30. He also developed DTSS (Dartmouth Time-Sharing System), which is one of the world’s first timesharing systems.

Major Achievements: He received the Computer Pioneer Award in 1985.

10. Grace Hopper

Who is she: Grace Hopper was a US Navy rear admiral and a computer scientist. She was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer.

What she has done: Hopper invented the first compiler for a computer programming language. She popularized the methodology of machine-independent programming language, which led to the development of COBOL. She is also credited for popularizing the term debugging for fixing machine glitches.

Major Achievements: She was the first woman in the world who got her name in Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, Honorary Doctor of Science from Marquette University, and National Medal of Technology (1991).

Read: 18 Greatest Female Scientists Of All Time

9. John Backus

John Backus at the control panel of 60-inch cyclotron Photographed by Donald Cooksey in 1939 

Who is he: John Backus was a computer scientist, best known as a developer of FORTRAN. He received an M.S in mathematics in 1950 from Colombia University.

What he has done: Backus directed the team that invented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language. He developed BNF (Backus-Naur form), a notation to define formal language syntax. He also popularized the term functional programming language.

Major Achievements: Backus received the W.W. McDowell Award, National Medal of Science, ACM Turing Award, Draper Prize, and named an IBM Fellow.

8. Bill Gates

Who is he: The man who needs no introduction. How could I leave out the world’s richest programmer whose software is used by the whole world?

What he has done: For the first five years at Microsoft, Gates personally oversaw every single line of code that the company sent out, often fixing ones he deemed buggy or incorrect. In the early days, he and Paul Allen wrote a full BASIC language interpreter in assembly language for a computer they didn’t even have access to, which had only 4k bytes of memory. They wrote it on PDP-10 running on Intel 8080 emulator.

Major Achievements: He was honored with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, and Bower Award for Business Leadership.

Read: Inspiring People Who Changed Some Most Common Viewpoints

7. Brian Kernighan

Who is he: Brian Kernighan is a computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs. Early in a career, he was a software editor for Prentice-Hall International.

What he has done: He developed Unix OS with Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. He authored numerous Unix programs, including cron and ditroff for Version 7. Kernighan is a coauthor of AMPL and AWK programming language. He also devised heuristic of the traveling salesman problem and graph partitioning (both are NP-complete problems).
Brian is also the coiner of the well-known expression “What You See Is All You Get”(WYSIAYG).

Major Achievements: He won INFORMS Computing Society Prize in 1993 and received many Teacher Awards throughout his career.

6. Ken Thompson

Who is he: Ken Thompson is a pioneer of computer science and hacker community. He is best known for designing and implementing the Unix operating system.

What he has done: Thompson developed the original Unix OS with Ritchie. He invented the B programming language and was one of the early developers of the Plan 9 operating system. He also created the Go programming language while working for Google. Moreover, Thompson worked on UTF-8 encoding, endgame tablebases, and regular expressions

Major Achievements: He was honored with the Turing Award, Japan Prize, IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, Computer Pioneer Award, and National Medal of Technology.

5. Tim Berners-Lee

Who is he: Tim Berners-Lee is a computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is the director of W3C, Web Science Research Initiative, and a senior researcher and holder of the Founders Chair (MIT).

What he has done: In 1989, Tim made a proposal for an information management system, and he successfully implemented the communication between an HTTP client and server via the internet. He is also a key figure behind data.gov.uk, a UK government project to open up all data acquired for official work for free reuse.

Major Achievements: Tim was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his outstanding work, honored with Software System Award, Pride of Britain, and Young Innovator of the Year (1995).

4. Bjarne Stroustrup

Who is he: Bjarne Stroustrup is a computer scientist and a research professor at Morgan Stanley. He was the head of Bell Labs’ large scale programming research department.

What he has done: Bjarne Stroustrup worked alongside Dennis Ritchie to develop the C language. In 1978, he began developing C++ language (later called C with Classes). He wrote its definition, produced the first implementation, and designed all its major facilities. Stroustrup also wrote the textbook for the C++ programming language.

Major Achievements: He was awarded the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement, Grace Murray Hopper Award, and he was made a fellow of the Computer History Museum for his C++ invention.

3. Linus Torvalds

Who is he: Linus Torvalds is a software engineer, project coordinator, and hacker. He is the man behind the Linux operating system.

What he has done: He has written the Linux kernel code (approx 2%) and the revision control system, Git. Many popular operating systems, including Ubuntu, Fedora, and Android are based on Linux. Torvalds holds the “Linux” trademark and monitors the use of it.

Major Achievements: He was honored with the Millennium Technology Prize, along with Shinya Yamanaka, for creating an open-source operating system. He also received an EFF Pioneer Award, Lovelace Medal from the British Computer Society, and Vollum Award from Reed College.

Read: 25 Biggest Inventions in Computer Science | The History

2. Dennis Ritchie

Who is he: Dennis Ritchie was a revolutionary computer scientist who played a pivotal role in developing the C programming language and Unix operating system. He was employed by Lucent Technologies & Bell Labs and where he wrote his Ph.D. thesis on ‘Program Structure and Computational Complexity.’ However, he never officially received his Ph.D. degree.

What he has done: He developed the C programming language on which numerous modern machine languages and technologies are based, including the PS4 and Xbox. Ritchie created a multiuser operating system called Unix. He is also known for developing ALTRAN, B, BCPL, and Multics.

Major Achievements: Ritchie was honored with Turing Award, Hamming Medal from the IEEE, Computer Pioneer Award, Computer History Museum Fellow, and Harold Pender Award.

1. Alan Mathison Turing

Who is he: Alan Turing was a computer scientist, mathematician, cryptanalyst, and logician. He has been called the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.

What he has done: During World War II, he devised numerous techniques for breaking German ciphers. Turing built an electromechanical machine that could find settings of the Enigma machine. He formalized the concepts of computation and algorithm with the Turing machine, a device that can be adapted to simulate the logic of any algorithms.

Major Achievements: He was honored with the Smith’s Prize, Officer of the Order of the British Empire, and Fellow of Royal Society.

Since 1966, Turing Award has been given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery for people’s contributions to the computing community.

Read: 16 Famous and Greatest Mathematicians

Update – Programmers Suggested By Our Readers

John von Neumann: is a mathematician, physicist, inventor, and programmer. He made significant contributions in linear programming, stochastic computing, and self-replicating machines. Neumann has also played a vital role in the development of game theory, the concept of cellular automata, and the universal constructor.

Steve Wozniak: single-handedly designed Apple-I and Apple-II computers in the late 1970s, and these two machines contributed significantly to the microcomputer revolution.

Fabrice Bellard: is best known as the creator of QEMU and FFmpeg software projects. He developed several other programs, including a small C compiler (3kB in size).