This is a list of programmers notable for their contributions to software, either as original author or architect, or for later additions.

See also: Game programmer, List of computer scientists

A - B - C - D - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M - N - P - R - S - T - V - W - Z

• Augusto Campos - Programmer and IT Specialist.
• Leonard Adleman - co-inventor of the RSA algorithm (the A in the name stands for Adleman), coined the term computer virus
• Alfred Aho - co-creator of AWK programming language (the A in the name stands for Aho), and main author of the famous Dragon book
• Paul Allen - Altair BASIC, Applesoft II BASIC, co-founded Microsoft
• Eric Allman - sendmail, syslog
• Marc Andreessen - co-creator of Mosaic, co-founder of Netscape
• Bill Atkinson - QuickDraw, HyperCard
• Jeff Atwood - StackOverflow, Coding Horror

• John Backus - FORTRAN, BNF
• Richard Bartle - MUD, with Roy Trubshaw, the father of MUDs
• Donald Becker - Linux Ethernet drivers, Beowulf clustering
• Doug Bell - Dungeon Master series of computer games
• Tim Berners-Lee - inventor of the World Wide Web
• Brian Behlendorf - Apache
• Daniel J. Bernstein - djbdns, qmail
• Eric Bina - co-creator of Mosaic web browser
• Deane Blazie - founder of Blazie Engineering (now part of Freedom Scientific), created technology for blind people who use braille
• Marc Blank - co-creator of Zork
• Joshua Bloch - core Java language designer, lead the Java collections framework project
• Daniel Bolstad - creator of Digital Ray 06-94 converter.
• Bert Bos - author of Argo web browser, co-author of Cascading Style Sheets
• David Bradley - coder on the IBM PC project team who wrote the Control-Alt-Delete keyboard handler, embedded in all PC-compatible BIOSes
• Andrew Braybrook - video games Paradroid and Uridium
• Larry Breed - co-developer of APL\360
• Jack E. Bresenham - creator of Bresenham's line algorithm
• Dan Bricklin - co-creator of VisiCalc, the first personal spreadsheet program
• Richard Brodie - Microsoft Word
• Danielle Bunten Berry (Dani Bunten) - M.U.L.E., multiplayer video game
• Walter Bright - Digital Mars, First C++ compiler, author of the D programming Language.

• Steve Capps - co-creator of Macintosh and Newton
• John D. Carmack - first person shooters Doom, Quake
• Vinton Cerf - TCP/IP, NCP
• Steve Chamberlain - BFD, Cygwin
• Bram Cohen - BitTorrent protocol design and implementation
• Alain Colmerauer - Prolog
• Mike Cowlishaw - REXX and NetRexx, LEXX editor, image processing, decimal arithmetic packages
• Alan Cooper - Visual Basic
• Jesse Corwin - PHP Guru
• Alan Cox - a developer of the Linux kernel
• Brad Cox - Objective-C
• Mark Crispin - inventor of IMAP, author of UW-IMAP, one of the reference implementations of IMAP4
• Ward Christensen - Wrote the first BBS (Bulletin Board System) system CBBS
• Pamela Crossley - creator of SIMPLE for academic management of web pages and related Unicode-capable applications for teaching and research
• William Crowther - Colossal Cave Adventure
• Ward Cunningham - inventor of the WikiWiki concept
• Dave Cutler - architect of Windows NT, VMS

D - F

• Ole-Johan Dahl - co-creator of SIMULA.
• Hugh Daniel - Lead programmer (and mis-management) of the FreeS/Wan project and a helper of the OpenZaurus project
• James Duncan Davidson - creator of Tomcat, now part of the Jakarta Project
• L. Peter Deutsch - Ghostscript, Assembler for PDP-1, XDS-940 timesharing system, QED original co-author
• Edsger Dijkstra - contributions to ALGOL, Dijkstra's algorithm, Goto Statement Considered Harmful
• Matt Dillon - programmer of various software including DICE and DragonflyBSD
• Adam Dunkels - author of the Contiki operating system, the lwIP and uIP embedded TCP/IP stacks, inventor of protothreads
• Les Earnest - author of the finger program
• Brendan Eich - creator of JavaScript
• Larry Ellison - co-creator of Oracle database, co-founder of Oracle Corporation
• Marc Ewing - creator of Red Hat Linux
• Stuart Feldman - creator of make, author of Fortran 77 compiler, part of original group that created Unix
• Jay Fenlason - Hack, GAS
• David Filo - co-creator of Yahoo!
• Andrew Fluegelman - author PC-Talk communications software; he is considered one of the fathers of shareware
• Martin Fowler
• Brian Fox - creator of Bash, Readline, GNU Finger, Meta-HTML
• Peter Fraser - FRED text editor
• Justin Frankel - Creator of Winamp
• Jim Fruchterman - founder of Arkenstone (now part of Freedom Scientific) and Benetech, created scanners for blind people
• Dan Farmer - Creator of COPS and SATAN Security Scanners

• Elon Gasper - co-founded Bright Star Technology, patented realistic facial movements for in-game speech. HyperAnimator, Alphabet Blocks, etc.
• Bill Gates - Altair BASIC, co-founded Microsoft
• John Gilmore - GDB
• Adele Goldberg - co-inventor of Smalltalk
• James Gosling - Java, Gosling Emacs, NeWS
• Bill Gosper - Macsyma, Lisp machine, hashlife, helped Donald Knuth on Vol.2 of The Art of Computer Programming (Semi-numerical algorithms)
• Andrew Gower - RuneScape Classic, RuneScape, co-founded Jagex
• Paul Gower - RuneScape Classic, RuneScape, co-founded Jagex
• Ryan C. Gordon (a.k.a. Icculus) - Lokigames, ioquake3, MojoSetup, etc
• Paul Graham - Yahoo! Store, On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp
• John Graham-Cumming - author of POPFile, a Bayesian filter-based e-mail classifier
• Richard Greenblatt - Lisp machine, Incompatible Timesharing System, MacHack
• Ralph Griswold - co-creator of SNOBOL and creator of Icon programming language.
• Andi Gutmans - co-creator of PHP programming language

• Jim Hall - started the FreeDOS project
• Douglas Richard Hanks, Jr. - creator of Sudosh and Enterprise Audit Shell (EAS)
• Brian Harvey - UCB Logo, see Logo programming language
• Cecil Hastings - wrote the classic Approximations for Digital Computers 1950s formulas for sin, cos, etc.
• David Heinemeier Hansson - created the Ruby on Rails framework for developing web applications.
• Rebecca Heineman - Author of Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate and Dragon Wars.
• Anders Hejlsberg - Turbo Pascal, Borland Delphi, C#
• Ted Henter - founder of Henter-Joyce (now part of Freedom Scientific) creator of Jaws, screen reader software for blind people
• Andy Hertzfeld - co-creator of Macintosh, co-founder of General Magic, co-founder of Eazel
• C. A. R. Hoare - first implementation of quicksort, Algol 60 compiler, Communicating sequential processes
• James Holmes - Committer on Struts project, create of Struts Console
• Grace Hopper - Navy Mark I computer, FLOW-MATIC (which heavily influenced COBOL)
• Dave Hyatt - co-author of Mozilla Firefox

I - J

• Miguel de Icaza - GNOME project leader, initiator of the Mono project
• Roberto Ierusalimschy - Lua leading architect
• Dan Ingalls - co-inventor of Smalltalk, Bitblt, and Pop-up Menus
• Geir Ivarsøy - co-creator of Opera web browser
• Ken Iverson - APL, J
• Toru Iwatani - creator of Pac-Man
• Bo Jangeborg - Sinclair ZX Spectrum games
• Paul Jardetzky - author of the server program for the first webcam
• Stephen C. Johnson - yacc
• Lynne Jolitz - 386BSD
• William Jolitz - 386BSD
• Bill Joy - BSD, vi; co-founded Sun Microsystems
• Robert K. Jung - creator of ARJ

• Ted Kaehler - co-inventor of Smalltalk
• Pavel Kanzelsberger - creator of Pixel image editor
• Mitch Kapor - Lotus 1-2-3, founded Lotus Development Corporation
• Jawed Karim - creator of YouTube and co-founder
• Phil Katz - creator of the ZIP file format, author of PKZIP
• Alan Kay - Smalltalk, Dynabook, Object-oriented programming, Squeak
• Mel Kaye - http://info.astrian.net/jargon/Hacker_Folklore/The_Story_of_Mel.html, a real programmer
• Ryan Kenward - Founder, programmer of the MUD Realm of Shadows.
• Stan Kelly-Bootle - Manchester Mark I, The Devil's DP Dictionary
• Brian Kernighan - co-creator of AWK programming language (the K in the name stands for Kernighan), author of ditroff text-formatting tool
• Gary Kildall - CP/M
• Tom Knight - Incompatible Timesharing System
• Jim Knopf - aka Jim Button, author PC-File flatfile database; he is considered one of the fathers of shareware
• Donald E. Knuth - TeX, CWEB, Metafont, The Art of Computer Programming, Concrete Mathematics

• Leslie Lamport - LaTeX
• Butler Lampson - QED original co-author
• Tom Lane - primary author of libjpeg, major developer of PostgreSQL
• Sam Lantinga - creator of SDL
• Dick Lathwell - co-developer of APL\360
• Chris Lattner
• Greg Lehey - FreeBSD and NetBSD developer, originator of the Vinum Volume Manager
• Rasmus Lerdorf - original creator of PHP
• Michael Lesk - Lex
• Graziano Liberati - co-author of ZNF
• Håkon Wium Lie - co-author of Cascading Style Sheets
• Robert Love - Linux kernel developer
• Ada Lovelace - First programmer (of Babbage Machines)
• Al Lowe - father of the Leisure Suit Larry series

• Raphael Manfredi - contributions to Perl, software architect and maintainer of gtk-gnutella
• Yukihiro Matsumoto - Ruby
• John McCarthy - Lisp
• Craig McClanahan - original author of Jakarta Struts, architect of Tomcat Catalina servlet container
• Daniel D. McCracken - professor at City College and author of Guide to Fortran Programming (1957)
• Douglas McIlroy - pipes and filters, concept of software componentry, Unix tools (spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, tr, etc.)
• Shawn McKenzie - AutoTheme
• Marshall Kirk McKusick - BSD
• Bertrand Meyer - Eiffel, Object-oriented Software Construction, Design by contract
• Bob Miner - co-creator of Oracle database, co-founder of Oracle Corporation
• Jeff Minter - Psychedelic, and often llama-related video games
• Lou Montulli - creator of Lynx browser, cookies, the blink tag, server push and client pull, HTTP proxying, HTTP over SSL, browser integration with animated GIFs, founding member of HTML working group at W3C
• Bram Moolenaar - author of text-editor Vim
• David Moon - Maclisp, ZetaLisp
• Charles H. Moore - inventor of the Forth programming language
• Roger Moore - co-developer of APL\360, creator of IPSANET, co-founder of I.P. Sharp Associates
• Urban Müller - Brainfuck language
• Mike Muuss - author of ping, network tool to detect hosts

N - P

• Patrick Naughton - early Java designer, xlock, HotJava
• Graham Nelson - creator of the Inform authoring system for Interactive fiction
• Col Needham - creator of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
• Peter Norton - programmer of the famous file manager program, Norton Commander
• Kristen Nygaard - SIMULA
• Ed Oates - co-creator of Oracle database, co-founder of Oracle Corporation
• Jarkko Oikarinen - creator of Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
• John Ousterhout - creator of Tcl/Tk
• Mark Overmars - Professor, Well known for creation of Game Maker
• Andrew and Philip Oliver, The Oliver Twins - Many Sinclair ZX Spectrum games including Dizzy
• Seymour Papert - Logo programming language
• Tim Paterson - author of 86-DOS (QDOS)
• Alexey Pajitnov - inventor of the game Tetris on the Electronica 60
• Charles Petzold - author of many Microsoft Windows programming books
• Jeffrey Peterson - key free software architect, creator of Quepasa
• Rob Pike - Wrote first bitmapped window system for Unix, co-creator of UTF-8 character encoding, author of text editor sam and programming environment acme, main author of Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems
• Sebastijan Pistotnik - one of the main developers of NConstruct
• Kent Pitman - technical contributor to the ANSI Common Lisp standard.

• Theo de Raadt - Founding member of NetBSD, founder of OpenBSD and OpenSSH
• Jef Raskin - started the Macintosh project in Apple Computer, designed Canon Cat computer, developed The Humane Environment program
• Eric Raymond - Open Source movement, author of fetchmail

• Dennis Ritchie - C, Unix, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Inferno
• Ron Rivest - co-inventor of the RSA algorithm (the R in the name stands for Rivest)
• Marc J. Rochkind - SCCS
• John Romero - first person shooters Doom, Quake
• Blake Ross - co-author of Mozilla Firefox
• Alessandro Rossini - co-author of ZNF
• Guido van Rossum - Python
• Jeff Rulifson - Lead programmer on the NLS project
• Rusty Russell - Creator of iptables for linux
• Steve Russell - First Lisp interpreter; original Spacewar! graphic computer game.

• Bob Sabiston - Rotoshop, interpolating rotoscope animation software
• Santiago Lizardo Oscares - Molins, Jerba, GPGEXT, Beobachter, MadCommander, libsdl for php
• Carl Sassenrath - Amiga, REBOL
• Chris Sawyer - Developer of Roller Coaster Tycoon and the Transport Tycoon series
• Bill Schelter - GNU Maxima, GNU Common Lisp
• Randal L. Schwartz - Just another Perl hacker
• Adi Shamir - co-inventor of the RSA algorithm (the S in the name stands for Shamir)
• Mike Shaver - Founding member of the Mozilla Organization
• Cliff Shaw - IPL, the first AI language
• Zed Shaw - Wrote the Mongrel Web Server, for Ruby web applications.
• Emily Short - prolific writer of Interactive fiction and co-developer of Inform version 7
• Jacek Sieka - Developer of DC++ an open-source, peer-to-peer file-sharing client
• Ken Silverman - creator of Duke Nukem 3D's graphics engine
• Charles Simonyi - Hungarian notation, Microsoft Word
• Colin Simpson - developer of CircuitLogix simulation software
• Rich Skrenta - co-founder of the Open Directory Project
• Matthew Smith - Sinclair ZX Spectrum games, including Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy
• Henry Spencer - C News, Regex
• Quentin Stafford-Fraser - author of the original VNC viewer, first Windows VNC server, client program for the first webcam
• Richard Stallman - Emacs, GCC, GDB, founder and pioneer of the GNU Project, terminal-independent I/O pioneer on ITS, Lisp machine manual (chineual)
• Guy Steele - Common Lisp, Scheme
• Alexander Stepanov - creator of Standard Template Library, STL
• Bjarne Stroustrup - C++
• Zeev Suraski - co-creator of PHP programming language
• Gerald Jay Sussman - Scheme
• Tim Sweeney - The Unreal engine, UnrealScript, ZZT

T - V

• Andrew Tanenbaum - Minix
• Audrey "Autrijus" Tang - designer of Pugs
• Simon Tatham - NASM, PuTTY
• Toma? Tekavec - one of the main developers of NConstruct
• Larry Tesler - the PUB markup language, the Smalltalk browser, debugger and inspector, and (with Tim Mott) the Gypsy word processor
• Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner - co-creator of the Opera web browser
• Avie Tevanian - author of the Mach kernel
• Ken Thompson - main designer and author of Unix, Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, B and Bon programming languages (precursors of C), inventor of UTF-8 character encoding, introduced regular expressions in QED.
• Michael Tiemann - GCC
• Linus Torvalds - original author and current maintainer of the Linux kernel and creator of Git, a source code management system
• Leonard H. Tower Jr. - GCC & GNU diff
• Michael Toy - co-developer of the computer game Rogue
• Roy Trubshaw - MUD - together with Richard Bartle, the father of MUDs
• Andrew Tridgell - Samba, Rsync
• Bob Truel - co-founder of the Open Directory Project
• Wietse Venema - Postfix, SATAN, TCP Wrapper
• Paul Vixie - BIND, Cron
• Patrick Volkerding - Original author and the current maintainer of the Slackware Linux Distribution

W - Z

• Larry Wall - Warp (1980s space-war game), rn, patch, Perl
• Bob Wallace - author PC-Write word processor; he is considered one of the fathers of shareware
• John Walker - co-founder of Autodesk
• John Warnock - creator of PostScript
• Pei-Yuan Wei - author of Viola, one of the earliest graphical browsers
• Peter J. Weinberger - co-creator of AWK (programming language) (the W in the name stands for Weinberger)
• Andrew Welch - author of Maelstrom, Snapz Pro; founder of Ambrosia Software
• David Wheeler - co-inventor of the subroutine; designer of WAKE; co-designer of Tiny Encryption Algorithm, XTEA, Burrows-Wheeler transform. (see http://www.dwheeler.com/dwheeler.html); this refers to several David Wheelers in computing
• Arthur Whitney - A+, K
• George Williams - creator of FontForge, software for font editing & creation, and various fonts.
• Roberta and Ken Williams -- Sierra Entertainment, King's Quest, graphic adventure game
• Sophie Wilson - Designer of the instruction set for the Acorn RISC Machine.
• Dave Winer - developed XML-RPC, Frontier scripting language
• Niklaus Wirth - Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon
• Stephen Wolfram - creator of Mathematica
• Don Woods - INTERCAL, Colossal Cave Adventure
• Steve Wozniak - Breakout, Apple Integer BASIC, founded Apple Computer (with Steve Jobs)
• Jerry Yang - co-creator of Yahoo!
• Victor Yngve - author of first string processing language, COMIT
• Jamie Zawinski - Lucid Emacs, Netscape, Mozilla, XScreenSaver
• Brandon Zehm - creator of sendEmail
• Philip Zimmermann - creator of encryption software PGP, the ZRTP protocol, and Zfone

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