Here’s another list of the 12 greatest programmers of all time. As I’ve said before, these list all always silly but a lot of fun to talk and argue about. This list’s greatest programmers are:
- Dennis Ritchie
- Linus Torvolds
- Bjarne Stroustrup
- Tim Brenners-Lee
- Brian Kernighan
- Donald Knuth
- Ken Thompson
- Guido Van Rossum
- James Gosling
- Bill Gates
- Niklaus Wirth
- Ada Lovelace
I’d argue against Bill Gates and Ada Lovelace. Gates is, by all accounts, an excellent programmer and certainly a mover in our field but his contributions are more as a businessman than a programmer. Lovelace deserves our respect as arguably the first programmer and certainly as the first woman programmer but I’m not sure she qualifies as one of the 12 greatest programmers. Fran Allen or Grace Hopper, I think, have a greater claim to the title. On the other hand, she is widely considered to be the first to develop an algorithm to be carried out by a machine. I’m willing to be persuaded on this point.
As I’ve said, the fun of these lists is arguing about them. No one should take them as gospel.
Update: Minor edit: added missing comma.