Computers are very complex machines, yet people operate them without any technical skills. They simply interact with the graphical interface, without knowing what’s happening 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 often seen as the 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 better programmers.
Microsoft’s CTO predicts that within the next five years, 95% of code will be generated by AI. This shift will allow humans to focus more on design, problem-solving, and creative thinking.
Table of Contents
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 contributions 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 the 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 the Game Developers Conference Lifetime Achievement award for his pioneering work.
18. Donald Ervin Knuth
Who is he: Donald Knuth is a mathematician, computer scientist, and author of The Art of Computer Programming. He is widely regarded as the father of algorithm analysis.
What he has done: Donald Knuth worked on the development of the analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and their 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 for BSD Unix and worked on the 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, the IEEE John von Neumann Medal, and 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 creating several programming languages, including Pascal and Modula, and for shaping many key concepts in software engineering. He was the lead designer of languages such as Algol W, Euler, Modula, Modula-2, Pascal, Oberon, Oberon-2, and Oberon-7. He also developed the Lola system for digital hardware design and simulation.
Achievements: He was honored with the Turing Award, the SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award, and the 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 known for coining the phrase: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
Major Achievements: Alan received the ACM Turing Award for his work on object-oriented programming, the UPE Abacus Award, and the 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, the Kyoto Prize, the National Medal of Science, the Computer Pioneer Award, and the 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 make it easier for non-experts to use computers. Along with John Kemeny, he co-founded True BASIC, Inc. to promote True BASIC, an updated version of the original language. BASIC became widely used on microcomputers, enabling small developers and business owners to create their own custom software.
Major Achievements: Kurtz was honored with the AFIPS Pioneer Award and the 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 the 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 the DTSS (Dartmouth Time-Sharing System), 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 with popularizing the term debugging to describe the process of fixing issues or glitches in machines.
Major Achievements: She was the first woman in the world to receive several prestigious honors, including being named a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, receiving an Honorary Doctor of Science from Marquette University, and being awarded the National Medal of Technology in 1991.
9. John Backus
John Backus at the control panel of a 60-inch cyclotron | Photographed by Donald Cooksey in 1939
Who is he: John Backus was a computer scientist best known for developing FORTRAN. He received an M.S. in mathematics in 1950 from Columbia University.
What he has done: Backus directed the team that invented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language. He developed the BNF (Backus-Naur form), a notation used to define the syntax of formal languages. 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 was 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 a PDP-10 running on an Intel 8080 emulator.
Major Achievements: He was honored with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, recognized as a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, and received the Bower Award for Business Leadership.
7. Brian Kernighan
Who is he: Brian Kernighan is a computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs. Early in his career, he worked as a software editor for Prentice Hall International.
What he has done: He developed the 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 languages. He also devised a heuristic for 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 the 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 the 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, the Japan Prize, the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, the Computer Pioneer Award, and the 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 proposed an information management system and successfully enabled communication between an HTTP client and server over the internet. He also played a major role in data.gov.uk, a UK government initiative that makes official data freely available for public use.
Major Achievements: Tim was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his outstanding work, honored with the Software System Award, the Pride of Britain, and the 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 the 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 received the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement and the Grace Murray Hopper Award, and was named a Fellow of the Computer History Museum for inventing the C++ programming language.
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 the Linux kernel. Torvalds holds the “Linux” trademark and monitors its usage.
Major Achievements: He was honored with the Millennium Technology Prize, along with Shinya Yamanaka, for creating an open-source operating system. He also received the EFF Pioneer Award, the Lovelace Medal from the British Computer Society, and the Vollum Award from Reed College.
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 the 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, which became the foundation for many modern programming languages and technologies, including those used in the PS4 and Xbox. Ritchie also created the multiuser operating system Unix and contributed to the development of ALTRAN, B, BCPL, and Multics.
Major Achievements: Ritchie was honored with the Turing Award, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE, the Computer Pioneer Award, the Computer History Museum Fellow, and the 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 developed 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 algorithm.
Major Achievements: He was honored with the Smith’s Prize, appointed as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), and named a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Since 1966, the Turing Award has been presented each year by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to recognize individuals for their outstanding contributions to the field of computing.
Update – Programmers Suggested By Our Readers
John von Neumann is a mathematician, physicist, inventor, and programmer. He made significant contributions to 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 the Apple I and Apple II computers in the late 1970s, and these two machines made significant contributions 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).
Frequently Asked Questions
Which country has the best coders?
According to HackerRank, a leading tech platform that focuses on competitive programming challenges, the top 10 countries with the best developers are:
- China
- Russia
- Poland
- Switzerland
- Hungary
- Japan
- Taiwan
- France
- Czech Republic
- Italy
The list is made by analyzing the performance of 1.5 million developers who take new coding challenges on HackerRank to improve their coding skills.
The report shows that Chinese developers outscore all other countries in the data structure, functional programming, and mathematics challenges, while Russians dominate in algorithms. Surprisingly, the United States ranked 28th, despite being home to many of the world’s most prominent tech giants and industry luminaries.
What are the best programming languages for Artificial Intelligence?
There is no single best language for AI; each has its own advantages and disadvantages. However, there are definitely some languages that are more suitable for certain AI tasks than others. For example, most programmers prefer to use R for sentiment analysis tasks, Python for NLP problems, and some like to use Java for security and threat detection.
Here are some of the most preferred programming languages for AI:
- Python
- R
- LISP
- Prolog
- C++
- Java
- 14 Best Artificial Intelligence Programming Language
Who is the world’s youngest computer programmer?
Kautilya Katariya from Northampton, UK, has been recognized as the world’s youngest computer programmer at just 6 years and 346 days old.. In November 2020, he received five certifications in Python and AI from IBM. He completed the Python for Data Science course from IBM Cognitive Class and the Foundations of AI professional certification on edX.
Read More
And, Steve Wosniak??
Linus is best and should be #1
What about Gary Kildal – Digital Research?
Ehem… is this about programmers or computer scientists? Turing can’t be considered as a programmer.
Turing introduced the concept of “Algorithm”, “Computation” and “Artificial Intelligence”, so it’s worth mentioning him.
Larry Wall ? Richard Stallman ? Definitely, it misses some. Bill Gates ? are you sure ?
Without Turing there would be no Linus
Without Ben Franklin (or any other earlier pioneer of electricity) there would be none of them, but that doesn’t mean those guys were great programmers.
No Dijkstra, no Alonzo Church? 😮
Turing first? Are you kidding me? He wasn’t a programmer, he built the hardware. Yes, that was similar at that time, but in that case #1 should be the maker of the first programmable computer on the planet.
And his name is Konrad Zuse. He made the first programmable computer named “Z3” and programmed it. How come that nobody knows his name? Is it because he worked for Nazis? So what, he was still the first.
Let’s just say that his electromechanical computer had a floating-point unit!! Yeah, electromechanical FPU. Now fast forward 40 years to Intel’s 8086 and 80286 and 80386sx….. neither of which had a floating-point unit.
So, Konrad Zuse is definitely number 1. First programmable computer in 1941. And with a FPU. Hats down.
Regarding Bill Gates, that’s just stupid. He’s like millionth programmer in the world. Or lower.
Torvalds just cloned UNIX and he is higher than one of the main guys who created it? Torvalds and Gates were excellent hobbiest programmers and pushed computers for the home user but they were nowhere near the same league as Ritchie or any of the major pioneers of Computing. I would put Torvalds and Gates side by side further down the list with Hopper in 3rd place or in the top 5.
Why isn’t Terry Davis #1 on this list?
I put Leonardo Torres Quevedo on #1, as he was the inventor of the first computer as it is understood today. He also invented radiocontrol in parallel to Tesla.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_Torres_y_Quevedo
Square got to final fintasy 6 on the SNES. That is 6 games from 1987 to 1994 while Valve still cant get a nother sequel in 14 years. Japanese developers knows what fans want even if they make failures like 13 they are quick to bring it back. Meanwhile at bethesda. “”Let’s drop another Skyrim and not remake arena or Daggerfall. btw what about paying for mods now? We are to lazy to make our own stuff.
Guido did’t create Python while working for Google. Python was first released in 1991.
This list is compiled based on the results of people’s coding challenges? I wouldn’t believe that based on where you have put some of these!