12.

Ada Lovelace

Augusta Ada King, more commonly known as Ada Lovelace, was an English
mathematician and the world’s first computer programmer and was chiefly known for her
work on Charles Babbage’s early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical
Engine. The notes she created for the Analytical Engine include what is recognized as the
very first algorithm created solely for the intent of being processed by a machine or in
other words, the world’s first computer program.Ada was a gifted girl from the beginning
with an uncommon mindset who predicted that one day computers would transcend from
simply being used for crunching numbers — totally against the popular opinion of that
time. Ada’s main inspiration came from her father and without her, who knows how long
it would take for another person to design a computer program.

11.NiklausWirth
Niklaus Emil Wirth is a Swiss computer scientist who is regarded as a pioneer of
computer programming among other fields in software engineering. He is best known for
designing several programming languages, including the highly popular Pascal, Euler,
Algol W, Modula, Modula-2, Oberon, Oberon-2, and Oberon-07. He also designed the
simple programming language PL/0 to illustrate compiler design which formed the basis
for many university compiler design classes.

Niklaus had previously worked on part of the design and implementation team for the
Lilith and Oberon operating systems as well as the Lola digital hardware design and
simulation system. Wirth’s pioneering work and development of innovative computer
languages helped him win the prestigious Turing Award in 1984.

10. Bill Gates

Arguably one of the most popular computer programmers of all time, Bill Gates is an
American business magnate, computer programmer, PC pioneer, investor, and
philanthropist. He is the co-founder, ex-executive officer and current chairman of
Microsoft, which is the world’s largest personal-computer software company. He is the
best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution and helped develop
Windows, which is the most used operating system in the world.

For the first 5 years at Microsoft, aside from handling the business side of the company,
Gates also personally oversaw every single code that the company sent out, often fixing
ones he deemed incorrect or buggy. Aside from his programming skills, he is widely
praised for his generosity and keen investment planning, but is highly criticized due to his
anti-competitive business tactics.
9. James Gosling

James Arthur Gosling is a Canadian computer scientist and an officer of the order of
Canada. He has coded quite a number of programs but is widely known for his creation
of the highly successful and commonly used Java programming language in 1994 as well
as its original virtual machine and compiler. He credits his creation towards his graduate
student days where he created a p-code virtual machine for the lab’s DEC VAX computer,
so that his professor could run UCSD Pascal programs and then realized that the
architecture-neutral execution for widely distributed programs could be achieved by a
similar technique.James has also made major contributions to several other software
systems, such as NeWS and Gosling Emacs. Due to his extra-ordinary
achievements Gosling was elected to Foreign Associate member of the United States
National Academy of Engineering.

8. Guido van Rossum

Guido van Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer who is the author of the popular
Python programming language that is wildly used today. His creation of Python lead him
to being declared a “Benevolent Dictator For Life” the In the Python community which
means that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions
where necessary, forever.

Rossum had developed Python while working at Google, where he also created Mondrian
(a code review system internally used by the Google) and Rietveld. After working for
Google for 7 years, he is now working at Dropbox. Rossum has been recognized as a
distinguished engineer by the Association for Computing Machinery and also received
the NLUUG Award in May 2003.

7. Ken Thompson

Kenneth Lane Thompson, or simply “Ken” as he is called by the hacker community, is an

American pioneer of computer science. Thompson had designed and implemented the
original Unix operating system and also invented the B programming language (the direct
predecessor to the famous C programming language), and was one of the early
developers of the Plan 9 operating systems.

Since 2006, Thompson has also co-invented the Go programming language while
working at Google. Ken’s other contributions included his work on regular expressions,
early computer text editors QED and ed, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, and even
his work on computer chess that included creation of endgame tablebases and the chess
machine Belle.
6. Donald Knuth

Donald Ervin Knuth is an American computer scientist and mathematician as well as a

Professor Emeritus (retired professor) at Stanford University. Knuth has been dubbed as
the “Father of the Analysis of Algorithms” as he has contributed to the development of
rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal
mathematical techniques for it.

Knuth has also popularized the asymptotic notation and he is also the creator of the TeX
computer typesetting system and the METAFONT font definition language and rendering
system. He has contributed to several branches of theoretical computer science and has
also created the Computer Modern family of typefaces.

5. Brian Kernighan
Brian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs
alongside Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. He is the co-creator and developer of
UNIX. He is also co-author of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. Kernighan
is currently a Professor and the Undergraduate Department Representative at the
Computer Science Department of Princeton University.

Kernighan became famous by co-authoring the very first book on the C programming
language and by authoring many UNIX programs such as ditroff, and cron for Version 7
Unix. His other notable work include his popular criticisms for Pascal called “Why
Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language”.

4. Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist who is renowned all
across the globe because of his creation of the World Wide Web as well as the
implementation of the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer
Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet in November, 1989.

Tim has won multiple awards for his pioneering ingeniousness such as becoming one of
only six members of the World Wide Web Hall of Fame and one of five Internet and Web
pioneers who have been awarded the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.
He is also the holder of the Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory.
3. Bjarne Stroustrup

Bjarne Stroustrup is a Danish computer scientist who is credited for the creation and the
development of the widely used and highly successful C++ programming language. He
not only invented it, but also evolved it, all by himself, by writing its early definitions,
producing its first implementation, formulating its design criteria, designing all its major
facilities, processing extension proposals for standards committee and its standard
textbook.Bjarne is currently working as a Professor and holder of the College of
Engineering Chair in Computer Science at Texas A&M University.

2. Linus Torvalds
Linus Benedict Torvalds s a Finnish American software engineer, who was the principal
driving force behind the development of the Linux kernel. Its creation itself is attributed
towards him and he later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and is now the
project’s coordinator.

Linus was honored with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology
Academy Finland because of his creation of a new open source operating system for
computers leading to the wide spread use of Linux kernel. He also created the ever
popular distrbuted version control system called Git in 2005,as well as the diving log
software Subsurface.

1. Dennis Ritchie

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist who is credited for
shaping and pioneering the digital era. He created the most commonly used C
programming language that is used today in various software applications, embedded
system development, operating systems, and has influenced most modern programming
languages.

Dennis also co-created the UNIX operating system. For his work, in 1983 he received the
Turing Award from the ACM, the Hamming Medal in 1990 from the IEEE and in 1999
the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton. He was the head of Lucent
Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. He passed
away on October 12, 2011 causing the Fedora 16 Linux distribution to be released in his
memory.