Thousands, too many to name. If you read lots of code and books, you will be humbled at many brilliant folks that are out there. Peter Norvig - Checkout his

Thousands, too many to name. If you read lots of code and books, you will be humbled at many brilliant folks that are out there. Peter Norvig - Checkout his page, and his books PPIA, AIMA Sandi Metz - Watch her talks Rich Hickey - Watch his talks Raymond Hettinger - Watch his live coding sections Brian Kernighan - read "The Pratice of Programming" Richard O'Keefe - read "The Craft of Prolog" John Carmack - The master of constraints and doing more by doing less Jan Weilemaker - maintainer of SWI-Prolog, read the code Linux Linus - His stubborness and meaniness has kept Linux together, if he was too passive, the kernel would have been a mess. Design by committe rarely works, someone gotta own it. He owns it. OpenBSD Theo - Unix systems are better secure because of Theo's stubbornness, lots of branches end up incorporating changes that started from OpenBSD. TJ Holowaychuk - I think he writes 10,000 lines of code a day PHP Nikita Popov - The kid is brilliant Anthony Minessale of Freeswitch Moxie Marlinspike - the guy that brought us signal Kyle Kingsbury aka Aphyr, checkout Jepsen, checkout his clojure tutorial. Sergio Moreira, Nagra - famous PSX Hacker