In my mind, that spans decades, some perhaps fairly recent. I am over 4 decades old, so I can do that. Here's an incomplete list in no particular order of some

In my mind, that spans decades, some perhaps fairly recent. I am over 4 decades old, so I can do that. Here's an incomplete list in no particular order of some that immediately come to mind: Brian Kernigan Dennis Ritchie Rob Pike Steve Wozniak RMS Dave Cutler Nolan Bushnell (Atari) Jay Miner (Amiga) Linus Torvalds Burrell Smith (Apple) Bill Atkinson (Apple) Bud Tribble (Apple) Avie Tevanian (Apple/NeXT) Larry Wall (Perl) Anders Hejlsberg (C#/Borland Pascal) and even Jeff Raskin (Wikipedia him) and Charles Petzold for his early Windows API work. And DHH, even though he's a kid. Those are the ones that are particularly notable to me personally.