30 Most Influential People In Programming

30 Most Influential People In Programming(webdesigndev.com)

9 points by amutap 16 years ago | 20 comments

Seems telling that the most influential people in programming are listed as the developer of the web, then the developer of wordpress, then the developers of Google. Also a list that includes Jeff Atwood but not Alan Turing or Alonzo Church?

On a "who is missing" list, I know everyone will always say "x is missing" but if we include bloggers Steve Yegge is more influential (and his rants will have longer lasting effect) than some of these while as the comments mention where is Anders Hejlsberg, Donald Knuth, Steve McConnell, Allan Kay etc.

Also, for the list of "why are they on there, is there some sort of deal going on": Dion Almaer (just some writer on an Ajax tute site?) and Craig Newmark (craigslist???).

Douglas Crockford, Jeff Atwood, Kathy Sierra and Scott Hanselman are all "maybe candidates" along with Steven Frank (who the author of this article says started a company who "make many amazing Mac applications. I would recommend buying more a(sic) less every one.") and Ben Goodger (worked on FF and Chrome).

dejv 16 years ago | |

Simply, this list is crap

nopassrecover 16 years ago |

Haha this comment from the original post by Roger Pence is gold:

Timothy Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Ken Thompson, James Gosling, Brendan Eich, Bjarne Stroustrup, Alan Cooper, Edsger Dijkstra, Doug Crockford, John Resig (et al) ... Jeff Atwood.

Jim Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Eric Clapton, Duane Allman, BB King, George Harrison ... Nick Jonas.

Jesus. What’s next? "

jrockway 16 years ago | |

Jeff Atwood is influential. He has taught a large number of people how not to write.

loup-vaillant 16 years ago |

Another contradiction: there is Linus Torvalds… and not Richard Stallman. It's like pretending the Linux kernel is more important than gcc and the rest of GNU.

swombat 16 years ago | |

Not to mention Emacs - a pretty influential programming tool that Richard Stallman built...

cyanbane 16 years ago |

The pic of Dijkstra (#18) is actually a picture of Dr. David Gries (Cornell/UGA) who was one of my prof a bit ago. Me thinks this list wasn't very well vetted and was hastily put together for some Digg "Top X" mojo.

nopassrecover 16 years ago | |

Good pick and yep I don't think it was proof read either. I couldn't say I know what Dijkstra looks like off hand but I thought the photo was too recent :P

smithjchris 16 years ago | |

I think you are right. There is a celebrity culture around around the Internet at the moment. Just having a blog is enough to get you on the guest list.

What happened to Anders Hejlsberg and Niklaus Wirth for example?

Oh wait the domain webdesigndev.com gives it away. Web design is not programming proper!

coolestuk 16 years ago |

I assumed Alan Kay was going to be in the list, somewhere in the top 3.

After all, the mac UI concept (and hence Windows) could be traced back to him. He invented OO, and Smalltalk is still in use and his free IDE Squeak has produced one of the most amazing web technologies (Seaside). (One can even argue that Java is an attempt to combine Smalltalk with C++. )

Kay is also one of the principal leads of the Croquet project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project), pushing the concept of networking into a new dimension. Oh, and we could also trace the whole concept of laptops/netbooks to Kay's dynabook.

I think most of the people in that list should be embarrassed that Kay was not listed way above them.

swombat 16 years ago |

Jason Fried? Influential in programming?

I'd agree he's influential in the start-up community, but programming? Don't think so.

Hilarious that at the same time as including Jason Fried, they omitted DHH... Or Matz, for that matter.

Aleran 16 years ago |

"AjaxIan teaches people about the popular javascript language, Ajax."

AAAAAaaah... What?

metachris 16 years ago |

As other commenters pointed out, the list is interesting but more than incomplete.

RMS is missing? And I'd argue that John D. Carmack of ID software (#30) was quite a bit more influential than #28 (Ajaxian) and #29 (Craigslist).

Did you guys read that more than interesting paper on how ID software invented basically everything for 3D games when it deemed impossible? ('The Wizardry of ID' - http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~sakella/graphics04/handouts/id_spectr...)

dragonquest 16 years ago |

Frankly, the list seems put by a social news surfer and counting how many times a product gets mentioned and who its creator is. Granted since its a WebDesign site, but if you're putting the likes of Ken Thompson in there, you're probably gunning for the elders in all fields of programming.

If that be the case, why put Jason Fried in there without mentioning Guy Steele. Or John Resig but missing out on Charles Moore. I'm not saying Fried or Resig are not good, but surely not in the same category as K&R or GvR. And where is Matz? :)

bodhi 16 years ago | |

I believe Jason Fried isn't even a programmer?

sorbits 16 years ago | | |

He is not, and if someone from 37 signals should be on a list of influential programmers, surely it should be David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of the Rails framework).

But definitely this list is crap! From my list of “who is missing” is Alexander Stepanov, the creator of the standard template library and an advocate of generic programming.

dejv 16 years ago |

Main problem of this list is that 30 is huge number. You can simply create Top 5 or 10 list of most influential programmers and place just A+ people on them, but there are no 30 A+ so you need to place "just" A players and there are hundreds of them.

Another problem of this list is that they place also B and C level players and also non programmers (Jason Fried).

tybris 16 years ago |

This list is so bad it's embarrassing to see all those great people on there.

lispm 16 years ago |

web programming mostly

csomar 16 years ago |

not really accurate, larry page made Google but it's not that influencing: google is influancing but not larry.

people who are influencing are: Jeff at wood, Joel Spolsky and other famous bloggers.

IMHO

nopassrecover 16 years ago | |

Well if we include business influences like they have then PG has been a pretty big influence on plenty I'm sure.

Steve McConnell and the guys behind The Pragmatic Programmer are more influential on a programming mindset than Atwood or Spolsky.

And you couldn't include Atwood before Spolsky at all, Spolsky has clearly been more influential to programmers. Perhaps because these guys are more web focused they have been less influenced by the more programming focus of Spolsky.