Ask HN: Do you consider anyone a pioneer in computer science since 1990?

10 points by ilbe 12 years ago | 5 comments

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pioneers_in_computer_science

ig1 12 years ago |

I think it's too early to say, because the impact of work is seen over time.

But candidates probably include Breiman/Cutler for Random Forests, Dean/Ghemawat for MapReduce, Peter Shor for Shor's algorithm, Daphne Koller for machine learning, Jon Kleinberg for network algorithms, Luis von Ahn for human computation.

onion2k 12 years ago |

A couple of obvious exceptions are John Carmack (for 3D graphics algorithm design) and Linus Torvalds (for OS design), although whether or not they contributed to 'computer science' rather than their particular software domain is debatable.

pharaohgeek 12 years ago | |

I would argue that Torvalds merely built upon already established OS principles, rather than being a pioneer in OS design. Linux, by design, is nothing more than an open-source UNIX equivalent. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. It's just not some groundbreaking work. I completely agree with Carmack, however.

oldbuzzard 12 years ago |

How about James Gosling for Java(1994).

argumentum 12 years ago |

The word "pioneer" refers to contributions at the birth of a field. CS is now an established field, there are no more "pioneers" in the sense that there are no longer "pioneers" discovering America by crossing oceans.

There are certainly "pioneers" operating today in sub-domains of CS: in machine learning, artificial intelligence, in parallelization, networking, cryptocurrency etc.

(and countless other fields related to or derived from CS).