Programming languages

Alan Perlis

Alan Perlis (1922–1990) was an American computer scientist who received the first Turing Award in 1966, co-designed ALGOL, and founded Carnegie Mellon's computer science department.

Bjarne Stroustrup

Bjarne Stroustrup, born in 1950 in Århus, Denmark, is a Danish computer scientist who created C++ at AT&T Bell Labs in 1979 and led its standardization.

Chris Lattner

Chris Lattner is an American software engineer who created LLVM, Clang, and Swift at Apple, later co-authored MLIR and co-founded Modular, whose Mojo language Qualcomm acquired in 2026.

David Gries

David Gries, born 1939, is an American computer scientist and Cornell professor emeritus who wrote the first compilers textbook and championed teaching programming as a mathematical discipline.

Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie (1941–2011) was an American computer scientist at Bell Labs who created the C programming language and co-created Unix with Ken Thompson, winning the 1983 Turing Award.

Douglas McIlroy

Douglas McIlroy, full name Malcolm Douglas McIlroy, is a computer scientist who headed Bell Labs computing research, where Unix was born, and conceived the Unix pipe.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Edsger W. Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist who devised Dijkstra's shortest-path algorithm, built the first ALGOL 60 compiler, and won the 1972 Turing Award.

Frances Allen

Frances Allen was an American computer scientist at IBM who pioneered optimizing compilers, becoming in 2006 the first woman to win the ACM A.M. Turing Award.

Gerald Jay Sussman

Gerald Jay Sussman is an MIT computer scientist who co-invented the Scheme programming language in 1975 and coauthored Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, the "Wizard Book."

Grace Hopper

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (1906–1992), known as Admiral Hopper, was an American computer scientist and Navy rear admiral who built early compilers for the UNIVAC I and helped bring about COBOL.

Guy L. Steele Jr.

Guy L. Steele Jr. is an American computer scientist who co-created the Scheme programming language in 1975, co-wrote The Java Language Specification, and retired in January 2025.

Ike Nassi is an American computer scientist and serial entrepreneur who co-created the Nassi–Shneiderman diagram, a 1973 structured alternative to the flowchart, and later held senior software roles at Apple.

Ikuo Takeuchi

Ikuo Takeuchi (竹内郁雄, born 1946) is a Japanese computer scientist known for the Takeuchi function behind the Lisp benchmark "Tak", the multi-paradigm language TAO, and the ELIS Lisp machine.

James Gosling

James Gosling is a Canadian computer scientist, born in 1955, best known as the creator of the Java programming language, which he designed at Sun Microsystems.

Jamie Zawinski

Jamie Zawinski, known online as jwz, is an American programmer who created Lucid Emacs, wrote the Unix Netscape Navigator, ran mozilla.org, and owns the DNA Lounge nightclub.

Joseph Weizenbaum

Joseph Weizenbaum (1923–2008) was a German-American computer scientist who created ELIZA, the first chatbot, and later criticized artificial intelligence in his 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason.

Ken Kennedy (computer scientist)

Ken Kennedy (Kenneth W. Kennedy, 1945–2007) was an American computer scientist at Rice University whose compiler optimization research helped ordinary scientists use supercomputers; he founded Rice's computer science department.

Kristen Nygaard

Kristen Nygaard (1926–2002) was a Norwegian computer scientist who, with Ole-Johan Dahl, designed the Simula languages and introduced objects, classes, and inheritance, earning the 2001 Turing Award.

Michael Carbin

Michael Carbin is an American computer scientist and MIT associate professor who heads the Programming Systems Group at CSAIL, known for running programs reliably on unreliable hardware.

Milind Kulkarni

Milind Kulkarni is a computer scientist who heads Purdue University's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and studies compilers and runtimes for irregular parallel data.

Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus "Bucky" Wirth (1934–2024) was a Swiss computer scientist who designed Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon, won the 1984 Turing Award, and taught at ETH Zurich from 1968 to 1999.

Nobuo Yoneda

Nobuo Yoneda (米田信夫) was a Japanese mathematician and computer scientist, professor at the University of Tokyo, whose Yoneda lemma is a central result of category theory.

Ole-Johan Dahl

Ole-Johan Dahl was a Norwegian computer scientist who, with Kristen Nygaard, created the Simula languages at the Norwegian Computing Center, introduced object-oriented programming, and won the 2001 Turing Award.

Peter Naur

Peter Naur (1928–2016) was a Danish computer scientist who edited the 1960 Algol 60 report, helped establish Backus-Naur Form, coined "datalogy", and won the 2005 Turing Award.

Peter O'Hearn

Peter O'Hearn is a computer scientist whose separation logic enabled tractable reasoning about program memory, and whose Infer analyzer found hundreds of thousands of bugs at Facebook.

Ravi Sethi

Ravi Sethi is a computer scientist known for the Sethi–Ullman algorithm and for co-authoring the compilers textbook Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, the "dragon book."

Rob Pike

Rob Pike, also known as Robert Pike, is a Canadian-born American software engineer best known for co-creating the Go programming language at Google in 2009.

Robin Milner

Robin Milner (1934–2010) was a British computer scientist at Edinburgh and Cambridge who created ML and CCS and won the 1991 Turing Award for machine-assisted proof, type inference, and concurrency.