2020-02-28
Many of these people have influenced and inspired my career, my programming style, and in some ways, my life as well. This list is in no particular order, and if my opinions change, instead of editing this list a revised list will be created.
As the creator of the B programming language, Ken Thompson can be regarded as the earliest influence of the C language. Although B is no longer used today, his foresight into its design has very well shaped the syntax and design of most modern day programming languages. He went on to co-create the C programming language along with his colleague at Bell Labs, Dennis Ritchie.
He was also an creator and pioneer in some of the most influential operating systems in the world such as Plan 9, Multics, and Unix. After the 2000s, Ken went on to work at google and co-created the Go programming language.
Dennis Ritchie is well known for being the main creator of the C programming language and Unix. He is also credited with being a pioneer of Multics, Plan 9, and Inferno. The “R” in the famous mnemonic “K&R” represents the “R” in his last name, “Ritchie”.
Brian represents the “K” in “K&R” and is known for being the an author of many early programming learning resources such as “The C Programming Language” and “The Unix Programming Environment”. Additionally, he co-created the Lin-Kernighan heuristic and popularized many programming conventions such as learning by “Hello, World!” and the K&R programming style.
Bjarne is well known for being the creator of C++ while working in Bell Labs. Originally called “C with Classes”, it was Bjarne’s attempt to extend C with more modern paradigms and patterns such as inheritance, all while maintaining C’s blazing fast performance.
A co-founder for id Software, John was one of the leading minds in game development, computer graphics, and graphics programming. He revolutionized many new ideas and implemented many ground breaking optimizations in software implementations for vector mathematics and rasterization. He later went on to become the CTO of Oculus VR to once again revolution the space of computer graphics, but this time it would be in VR.
Microkernels are notrious for being slow as a result of their excessive IPC calls. This idea was challenged head first by Jochen with his creation of the L4 microkernel. The L4 family of microkernels has many innovative features that make its design ground breaking. It’s remarkably simple which allows it to have the fastest IPC of any kernel in existence. It’s a microkernel which gives it security by moving all vulnerable and unnecessary software into userland. It’s small; most implementations are less than 6000 lines of code. Its small size allows it to be formally verified which grants guarantees such as safe, secure, and bug-free behavior.
Andrew is well known for creating the Minix microkernel which would be the main educational resource for learning and teaching kernel development. Andrew’s work has influenced many projects such has Linux, Redox, and Xinu.
Linux and Git are some of the most influential pieces of software of all time and, they were both created by Linus.
Although Steve Jobs is famous for directing the success of Apple, Steve was the brain behind the majority of Apple’s technology and engineering feats. He continued as Apple’s lead engineer until the 1980s.
FFmpeg is likely the most popular media codec platform in the world and is a creation of Fabrice Bellard. Fabrice also created QEMU which is becoming more and more prevalent in virtualization and emulation.
From a pure computer science standpoint, Fabrice may be the most knowledgeable on this list. His entries won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest 3 times. In addition, he’s created many innovative new formulas and implementations for various challenges. Lastly, he created the Tiny C Compiler which the smallest and fastest self-hosting C compiler which is impossibly small at ~100KB.
Jeremy is well known for being the creator of RedoxOS which is an operating system which uses multiple revolutionary technologies. Some of these technologies include: RedoxKernel, a tiny microkernel written in Rust. Ion, a shell written in Rust which aims to be faster than dash yet more advanced than ZSH and FISH. TFS, a filesystem that aims to be more advnaced than ZFS, EXT4, and F2FS.
Additionally, Jeremy is a well known contributor to the the Rust programming language and is a principal maintainer and developer of the PopOS distro.
Raph is the creator of the Xi Tookit which is a highly performant toolkit written in Rust that implements the fastest programming patterns and paradigms. Xi Toolkit is used by Xi Editor, a text editor created by Raph that potentially out-performs notepad++. He’s also a lead developer for Google’s next-gen OS based on a microkernel; FushiaOS.
Graydon was the lead-creator of the Rust programming language during his time at Mozilla. His ideas paved the way for many of Rusts revolutionary features. He has since moved on to Apple to develop the Swift programming language.