Don Knuth

If there was one (male) god of programming it is this man Did use email from 75 to 90, uses mmail now.

Steve Ditlea: Since the 1960s, Donald Knuth has been writing the sacred text of computer programming. He's a little behind schedule, but he has an excuse: he took time out to reinvent digitial typography.

When you write about Donald Knuth, it's natural to sound scriptural. For nearly 40 years, the now-retired Stanford University professor has been writing the gospel of computer science, an epic called The Art of Computer Programming. The first three volumes already constitute the Good Book for advanced software devotees, selling a million copies around the world in a dozen languages. His approach to code permeates the software culture.

"Mathematics belongs to God," he declared. But Knuth's God is not above tricks on the faithful. In his TeX guide, The TeXbook, he writes that it "doesn't always tell the truth" because the "technique of deliberate lying will actually make it easier for you to learn the ideas." Mark Wallace in Salon on Donald Knuth

To get Knuth fast, check out this one: Important Message to all Users of TeX

Anders Hejlsberg

developed Turbo Pascal practically singlehandedly, left Borland after 13 years with Pascal, objects and Delphi to join MS, now the architect of C# . The man who gave peek, poke, deek and doke to your avarage Pascal programmer. Heavy sinner against the laws of [Niklaus Wirth]

A conversation with A. H. about handcuffs and stuff (via hns and lcom)

update Dec 2005: Of course the guy's got wikipedia entries in different languages now (deservedly) and many good links on google. . Here's what he says about MSTF:

I also think that Microsoft in the last five years has gone through a big transformation in terms of transparency and community involvement, openness and so forth. The kinds of dialogues we engage in with customers now are very, very different from what they were five years ago, and night and day from what they were ten years ago. You know, the whole industry, through blogging and open source and what have you, has very much switched around, and sort of the center of gravity lies much more with the individual developer and the individual person than it used to.

I tend to quite-believe him. But then again, I don't see this has reached many of their otherwise indoctrinated people on the edge yet. They are trying to change and with all that image to defend it is clear that J++ was not their way to go.

Dan Ingalls

one of the creators of Smalltalk, my hero! Ingalls also co-invented the BitBlt graphics primitive (with Diane Merry) and pop-up menus and was the principal designer of the Fabrik visual-programming environment while at Apple Computer." Dan also runs "WeatherDimensions Incorporated", a company that sells a weather station he designed.

Grace Murray Hopper

developed A0 and Flow-Matic early pioneer in HW-abstraction, mathematician, rear Admiral in the US Navy research, chiefest inventor of the compiler, imho

Grace M. Hopper entered the US Navy in 1943 to work for the Ordonance Computation Project at Harvard. There she worked with Howard Aiken on Harvard Mark I and was only the 3rd person to program it.

Afterwards she worked on the Harvard Mark II after the war. She then joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation as a Senior Mathematician in 1949, discovered the 1st computer "bug" finished Flow-Matic, the first English-language data-processing compiler in 1952:

"Nobody believed that," she said. "I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic."

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper retired from the Navy at age 80, the first woman to receive America's highest technology award as an individual.

www-groups.cs.st-and.ac.uk

Penguin Powered: Monte Davidoff

Here is a quote and some history bits about and from Monte Davidoff who did the floating point stuff when he, Paul Allen and bad Billy G. wrote a BASIC interpreter for the MITS Altair, arguably the first widely available microcomputer software in the mid-seventies and surely the first Micro-Soft product:

Although he helped put the fledgling Micro-Soft on the map, Davidoff has subsequently worked with Unix for most of his career. Microsoft actually bought into Unix very early on in 1979, but its own AT&T derivative Xenix found few buyers, and it eventually spun the work out to the Xenix authors SCO. And these days, Davidoff runs Linux (Red Hat 6.1) at home.

"I'm really excited about Linux," he says. "Having used Unix all these years and put out professional Unix products, they've done a really good job."

His other passion, he tells us, is Python: "Hats off to them. It's an extremely well designed language. It's object orientated from the get-go. They've really succeeded there," he says, and commends it as the ideal teaching language. That used to be BASIC, of course.

All of this comes from an interview with Monte Davidoff in the Register, UK.

Let us mention, that programming also used to be taught by LOGO. Using BASIC less and LOGO more would have done a lot of good for teaching programming. But, then again, there are reasons, why BASIC is still bigger than Smalltalk and LOGO has all but disappeared.

Let us also mention that despite his youth, Mr. Davidoff had also been a <a href="www.multician.org"l>Multician for Honeywell.

Im nachhinein fanden wir heraus, dass Chris Langreiter dieses ganze Register Interview schon viel früher als wir gefunden und gelinkt hatte (2001-05-15) und zwar unter dem Titel: Was Bill any good at coding?