Please visit my blog to see the original article
A programmer is someone who can create and write computer programs. No matter what kind of programmer a person is, more or less, he is contributing something to our society. However, some programmers contribute more than an average person can in a lifetime. These programmers were pioneers and respected, and what they contributed changed the entire course of our civilization. Let’s take a look at 12 great programmers of all time.
The first computer programmer: Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace, born August Ada Byron, was a math enthusiast who is widely recognized as the first computer programmer.
Between 1842 and 1843, Ada spent nine months translating Italian mathematician Luigi Federico Menabrea’s treatise on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. To the end of the translation, she added many notes detailing the method of calculating the Bernoulli number with the machine, which is considered the world’s first computer program. As a result, Ada is also considered the world’s first programmer.
The father of Linux: Linus Torvalds
Linus Benedict Torvalds, noted computer programmer, hacker, inventor of the Linux kernel and a collaborator on the project. Linux used personal time to create one of the most popular operating system cores in the world today. He also started the open source project Git and became the lead developer.
Won the 2014 Computer Pioneer Award for the successful development of the Linux kernel. His award marked several firsts in the history of the Computing Pioneer Award: the first to go to a Finn; The first award to a “after 60” (in fact, only 3 days is “after 70”); The prize-winning achievements were made while he was a student.
Linus is also known on online mailing lists as having a hot temper. For example, when I was arguing with someone about why Git didn’t use C++ for development, I exchanged bullshit with him. He also refers to the OpenBSD crowd as “A bunch of Masturbating Monkeys”.
Pascal’s father: Niklaus Wirth
Niklaus Emil Wirth, born in Winterthur, Switzerland, is a Swiss computer scientist.
From 1963 to 1967, he was an assistant professor in the Computer Science department at Stanford University, and later held the same position at the University of Zurich. In 1968, he became a professor of informatics at eth Zurich and spent two years at Xerox PARC.
He was the lead designer of several programming languages, including Algol W, Modula, Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon, and others.
He was also one of the inventors of Euler. In 1984, he won the Turing Prize for developing these languages. In addition, he was a key member of the design and operation team of the Lilith computer and Oberon systems.
4. Apple co-founder: Steve Wozniak
Stephen Gary Wozniak was an American computer engineer who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs.
Wozniak created the iPhone I and iI in the mid-1970s, the latter of which became the best-selling PC of the 1970s and early 1980s, and is credited with bringing computers from the past to the home.
5. Father of Java: James Gosling
James Gosling, canadian-born software expert and co-founder of the Java programming language, is considered the “father of Java”.
By the age of 12, Gosling was designing video games and helping neighbors repair harvesters. 1981 developed Gosling Emacs, an Emacs-like editor running on Unix (written in C, using Mocklisp as an extension language). He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1983. After graduation, he went to work for IBM, designing IBM’s first-generation workstation NeWS system, but was not taken seriously. He later moved to Sun. In 1990, he worked with Patrick Naughton and Mike Sheridan, among others, on the Green Project to develop Oak, a language later renamed Java. In late 1994, James Gosling presented a Java program at a conference in Silicon Valley. In 2000, Java became the most popular computer language in the world.
6. B, C, and Unix by Ken Thompson
Ken Thompson is a computer scientist and software engineer born in New Orleans. With Dennis Ritchie, he designed THE B and C languages and created the Unix and Plan 9 operating systems. Thompson is also a co-author of the programming language Go and a 1983 Turing award winner with Dennis Ritchie.
Ken Thompson’s other contributions include inventing regular expressions, developing the early computer word editors QED and Ed, defining utF-8 encoding, and developing computer chess.
7. The father of PHP: Rasmus Lerdorf
Rasmus Lerdorf was born in Canada and moved to Denmark at an early age. In 1994, Rasmus developed PHP as a simple Program written in Perl to count visitors to his own web site. It was later rewritten in C with access to the database.
In 1995, Lerdorf published the first version as Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools). Lerdorf wrote several documents describing the program and released PHP1.0. In this earlier version, there were simple features like guest book, guest counter, and so on. More and more sites are using PHP and are clamoring for features such as looping statements and array variables.
PHP2.0 was released in mid-1995, after new members joined the development effort. The second edition is titled PHP/FI(Form Interpreter). PHP/FI added support for MySQL, thus establishing PHP’s position in dynamic web development.
8. C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan
Brian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist. At Bell LABS, he worked with Thompson, the creator of Unix, and Dennis Ritchie, the father of the C language, and was a major contributor to the development of Unix. He is one of the authors of AWK and the AMPL programming language, and the K in AWK stands for Kernighan. He is also one of the authors of the C Programming Language, a book he wrote with Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of C, known simply as “K&R C”. Brian Kernighan is now a professor in the School of Computing at Princeton University and a representative of the Undergraduate division.
9. Ruby Scripting Language Creator: Yukihiro Matsumoto
Yuhiro Matsumoto, a Japanese computer scientist and software engineer who graduated from the University of Tsukuba, first released the first version of the Ruby scripting language in 1995.
Ruby is a powerful object-oriented scripting language, which integrates the features of Perl, Python, Java and other languages. It has powerful word processing ability, simple syntax, and is completely object-oriented. At the same time, Ruby is an interpreted language that can be programmed quickly without compilation and is good at tasks such as text processing and system administration.
10. Father of C++ : Bjarne Stroustrup
Bjarne Stroustrup (born 1950) is a Danish computer scientist best known for creating and developing the now-widely used C++ programming language. Bjarne is a visiting professor at Columbia University and currently works at Morgan Stanley.
In his own words, Bjarne “invented C++, wrote its early definition and made its first implementation… Selected the C++ design standard, designed the main C++ auxiliary support environment, and was responsible for handling the extension proposal of the C++ standards committee.” In addition, he wrote a book called C++ programming language, which is considered by many to be the canonical example of C++. The latest fourth edition was published in 2013 and includes some of the new features introduced in C++ 11.
11. Father of C and Unix: Dennis Ritchie
Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie died in the same month. During this time of year, Jobs is celebrated in many media outlets, but Dennis Ritchie is rarely mentioned.
Without Dennis Ritchie, there would be no modern computing as we know it. He is the father of the C language and co-inventor of the UNIX operating system.
There is no denying that Steve Jobs gave us innovations and iconic products the world has never seen before, as well as a legion of avid consumers and end users who worshipped him. Such things may never be seen again.
But the “magical” products created by Apple and Jobs and many others, and all that we now know and write about in modern computing, owe their existence to Dennis Ritchie, who died on October 12, 2011, at the age of 70.
C was developed between 1969 and 1973 by Rich, who is considered the first truly portable modern programming language. In the nearly 45 years since its birth, it has been ported to almost every architecture and operating system that has ever existed.
In addition, Rich is the co-inventor of the UNIX operating system. Of course, the prototype of UNIX was written in assembly language, and by the early 1970s was completely rewritten in C. To better understand the Unix family, take a look at the chart below.
For additional Dennis Ritchie achievements and contributions, I recommend reading the following two articles:
- Dennis Ritchie, that provide jobs with the shoulder of giants | shells net
- The father of the memory of the C language, Dennis Ritchie died six years | open source in China
To conclude, Ritchie’s bell LABS colleague and friend Brian Kernighan said, “Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants. Today, we all stand on the shoulders of Ritchie.”
This is probably the most powerful and pertinent assessment of Dennis Ritchie’s life.
12. Father of Python: Guido van Rossum
Guido van Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer. He received a master’s degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Amsterdam in 1982 and joined CWI, a multimedia organization, as a researcher in 1982. He is best known as the author of the Python programming language. In the Python community, Guido is recognized as a Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), meaning that he remains attentive to the Python development process and makes decisions when necessary.
The first public distribution of Python was released in early 1991. Guido, who originally lived in the Netherlands, moved to the United States in 1995 and met his current wife. Guido and his family, including his son Orlijn, who was born in 2001, had been living in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington state since early 2003, when they relocated to Silicon Valley. Guido has been at Google since 2005, spending half of his time working on Python. Guido now works for Dropbox.
Guido van Rossum applied for a job at Google and wrote just three words: “I wrote Python”. Of course, this turned out to be a joke about the long and complicated interview process at Google. In fact, when Guido joined Google in 2005, a number of Google engineers were already using Python, which Guido invented. Google hired Guido for Python — on the condition that he be allowed to spend half his working time maintaining Python and keep the copyright to himself.
Guido himself posted on Google +, “Don’t ask me to apply for Python development any more,” which was also very funny…
Refer to the article
- History’s greatest zen 12 | Python programmers
- Ada Lovelace | wikipedia
- Ada Lovelace: mathematical crisis in the 19th century, the mother of computer | electronic technology design
- Ada Lovelace, the First Tech Visionar | The New Yorker
- Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace (1815-1852) | Yale CS
- The achievement of apple co-founder Steve wozniak | tencent technology
- Think about some Unix40, | nguyen other web logs
- Unix alamo: graphic fine dozens of five computing pioneer | Linux community
- Dennis Ritchie, that provide jobs with the shoulder of giants | shells net
- The father of the memory of the C language, Dennis Ritchie died six years | open source in China
- The world’s ten hackers | baidu encyclopedia
- Pragmatic first: “father” of PHP Rasmus Lerdorf interview | ITeye
- C/Unix idea behind giant – Brian Kernighan | Turing community
- [English] Brian w. Kernighan: my half a century with CS (Turing interviews) | Turing community
- Exposed the truth: I interviewed Mr Matsumoto, founder of the Ruby language line hong (Matz) | shells log
- Bjarne Stroustrup | wikipedia
- Bjarne Stroustrup’s homepage
- Guido van Rossum – Personal Home Page