Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
News

Top Ten Software Innovators? 246

Posted by Cliff from the new-naming-conventions dept.
Rsriram asks: "At our company we have named some of the conference rooms with names of software innovators. The names include Ken Thompson, Donald Knuth, Ada Lovelace, Dennis Ritchie. We need to name 10 more rooms and I was wondering who Slashdot readers would think are the top ten software innovators. Not computer hardware but software. I was thinking Von Neumann, and Linus Torvalds would find a mention, What about Watts Humphrey?"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Top Ten Software Innovators? More

Top Ten Software Innovators?

Comments Filter:

  • Linus (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Komarosu ( 538875 ) <[nik_doof] [at] [nikdoof.net]> on Friday January 10, 2003 @08:33AM (#5053910) Homepage
    Your choice about linus is a good one, what can you say bar he has even Microsoft flapping...maybe deviating a bit but Richard Stallman? He and the FSF group have had a lasting effect on software...i'd class that as good reason :)
  • Linus and Stallman would be definites... and, shoot, what is the name of the Mozilla guy?

    If you wanted to go more "classical" you could do people like Blaise Pascal or Dikstra or even Turning.
    • Turning would be turing in his grave.

      SCNR
    • I like Linus Torvalds alot, and he wrote a great software product, but how exactly has he been an innovator? Stallman was more directly tied to the Free Software Movement and Open Source. He did do great things for computing, bringing *nix type power to desktops, but is copying another system really an innovation? I feel he should be seen more as a great engineer and designer, not necessarily an innovator. I guess I am not really an expert on the linux kernel, but as I understand it, it uses technology that has been around for awhile (as it should be if you are trying to build a solid system). From what I understand, Alan Cox was also more directly tied to any new innovations going into the kernel, while Linus is more of a commander-in-chief now.
    • ... you could do people like Blaise Pascal ...
      Pascal was not a software innovator as the submitter specifically requested. He was a mathematician who died in 1662, quite a bit before computers including the one Ada Lovelace worked on (she died in 1852).

  • Larry Wall.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by HaloZero ( 610207 ) <protodeka@@@gmail...com> on Friday January 10, 2003 @08:41AM (#5053929) Homepage
    Idolize he who gave us Perl. Without perl, there would be no slashdot. o_O Think about THAT one. :p

    (Actually, there probably WOULD be a Slashdot-esqe place, if not Slashdot simply done in a different language... BUT STILL!) It are Slashdot. We lubble slashdot. *hugs teh Slashdot*

  • what about (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Prowl ( 554277 ) on Friday January 10, 2003 @08:45AM (#5053941)
    tim berners-lee
    alan turing
    larry wall
    bill gates ??
    steve wozniak
    jay miner
    • McCarthy
      All the Multicians
      larry wall (for rn but not perl!)
      Kay, Ingalls (for Smalltalk)
      Massalin (read the thesis and weep)
      Cray, Amdahl, Josh Fisher (hw == sw)
      Hoare (for CSP)
      Pike for Pike-goodness

      Jay Miner? Maybe. I bought an Amiga 1000 as soon as they were available, I played games on the Atari 800. It was great at the time.

      All the graphics gurus...
      Blinn
      James Clark
      Porter + Duff (I use rc :)

      There are hundreds of them! Where do you stop?

    • Re:what about (Score:3, Interesting)

      by stevew ( 4845 )
      I'd agree with gates being here - he hacked together a reasonable Basic for uP's before anyone else did. (I lived through the era ;-)
      I can't agree with Woz MOSTLY because he is really a superb Hardware hacker. His software hacking ain't shabby - but his innovations were mostly in the hardware world.
    • tim berners-lee
      alan turing
      larry wall
      bill gates ??
      steve wozniak
      jay miner

      ...INCOMING!!!

  • Dijkstra (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Reemi ( 142518 )
    My personal favorite: Dijkstra

  • Woz (Score:2, Interesting)

    by calumr ( 175014 )
    Steve Wozniak [woz.org] gets my vote.

  • John Carmack (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Electrum ( 94638 ) <david@acz.org> on Friday January 10, 2003 @08:56AM (#5053971) Homepage
    John Carmack started the genre of 3D games on the PC. When it comes to games, who else do you think of?

  • How about.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by glh ( 14273 ) on Friday January 10, 2003 @08:58AM (#5053973) Homepage Journal
    Anders Hejlsberg the creator of C# (and Delphi?)
    - the "Hejlsberg" room

    Larry Wall the creator of Perl
    - the "wall" room?

    Alan Cooper "father of VB"
    - the "Closet"? :)

    • Or you could put Wall's name on the LabrARRY
    • Except C# and Visual basic gave nothing new to the world of computer science. Both languages are merely ho-hum tweaks to existing languages.

  • Obvious (Score:4, Funny)

    by DeadSea ( 69598 ) on Friday January 10, 2003 @08:59AM (#5053978) Homepage Journal
    Here is a list of who it should be (Sorry if I left anybody out):
    1. CmdrTaco [slashdot.org]
    2. Hemos [slashdot.org]
    3. CowboyNeal [slashdot.org]
    4. JonKatz [slashdot.org]
    5. Cliff [slashdot.org]
    6. jamie [slashdot.org]
    7. michael [slashdot.org]
    8. pudge [slashdot.org]
    9. timothy [slashdot.org]
    10. DeadSea [slashdot.org]
    • JonKatz is still with Slashdot? Wow.

      I totatlly forgot about him since I've had my account set up for the past month to ignore any article posted by him.

      I find Slashdot much better this way. I thought he would have left Slashdot by now.

      • Re:Obvious (Score:2, Interesting)

        by nelsonal ( 549144 )
        I enjoyed reading the flames on his articles, so I left him on, and I haven't seen an article from him for months. I think the Commodore toting kid in Afghanistan was the final nail in his coffin.
    • How about Philip Katz [thocp.net] the inventor of PK-Zip

      The internet would not be the same without Zip compression, and he made the software Shareware.
  • I was thinking Von Neumann

    Think of the US military engineers that actually built the von Neumann architecture, before it was known under his name or indeed known by him. von Neumann published it first, and when the engineers found out they decided to publish to get credit. But their paper was stopped by the US military. This according to at least one account

    The Book ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer [amazon.com] seems to give one opinion on who actually did what.

    /jeorgen

  • Linus (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sql*kitten ( 1359 ) on Friday January 10, 2003 @09:09AM (#5054021)
    . Not computer hardware but software. I was thinking Von Neumann, and Linus Torvalds would find a mention

    Linus Torvalds should not be on such a list. Tananbaum was wrong to say that Linux is obsolete, but he was correct that it is of little academic interest. Linus' skill is not in innovation, it is in execution and dare I say it, project management.

    Von Nuemann and the others you mentioned were theorists, people on the science side of computer science, who developed new theories. They changed the way people think about the whole field.

  • Tim Berners-Lee (Score:5, Insightful)

    by an_mo ( 175299 ) on Friday January 10, 2003 @09:10AM (#5054023) Journal
    He wrote the first web browser and server

  • My top ten (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Koos Baster ( 625091 ) <ghostbustersNO@SPAMxs4all.nl> on Friday January 10, 2003 @09:13AM (#5054036)
    My favorites:

    Jeff Minter
    E.W. Dijkstra
    Donald Knuth
    Niclaus Wirth
    Richard Stallman
    Bjarne Stroustrup
    Linus Torvalds
    Miquel d'Icaza
    Wouter van Oortmerssen
    Larry Wall
    • Dmitri Sklyarov
      Jon Johannsen
    • I'm not sure about both Stroustroup and Wall: Both basically created a language by merging features others alread had. This is of course a creative process of it's own, but I'd say the origial inventors of these features have deserved being on this list more.

      Miguel de Icaza? What's his innovation again? Writing a desktop because he didn't like something about the license used by people who wrote a desktop because they didn't like the license and technology other Desktops (Windows and CDE) used? Copying Outlook? Copying .NET?

  • how about... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by NemoX ( 630771 )
    The folowing has some people: softwarehistory important people [softwarehistory.org]

    Also, Ada Lovelase (Byron) assited Charles Babbage. How about: John von Newmann ("von Newmann architecture"), John Backus (FORTRAN), Niklaus Writh (Pascal), Dan Bricklin/Bob Frankston (first spreadsheet - VisiCalc),

    IMO, Bill Gates is not an inovator, he is a buisiness man who invented nothing that wasn't already on the market in the 80's.

  • Some cool people (Score:5, Interesting)

    by __past__ ( 542467 ) on Friday January 10, 2003 @09:17AM (#5054062)
    • Edsger Dijkstra, for stuff ranging from the shortest-path algorithm to "Basic considered harmful".
    • Turing and Babbage for the fundaments of CS
    • Alan Kay, inventor of smalltalk and the term "Object-Oriented Programming"
    • Fred Brooks, author of the Mythical Man Month
    • J. McCarthy, who developed Lisp by accident
  • I've been doing a (still very gappy) timeline [robotwisdom.com] of software/ data structures. Some of my faves:

    Alan Kay, Doug Englebart, Will Wright, Chris Crawford, Doug Lenat, Jay Forrester, Ivan Sutherland

  • my votes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ender Ryan ( 79406 ) <TOKYO minus city> on Friday January 10, 2003 @09:25AM (#5054098) Journal
    Larry Wall - This guy is great. He created Perl, a fun, interesting language with great obfuscation potential! - disclaimer: I earn a living writing Perl ;-)

    John Carmack - Doom, Quake, Q3A engine, etc. Plus he works on rockets! John Carmack has done a lot to promote the state of computing today. Just look at how people benchmark PCs, "I got 1.5 trillion fps in Q3A dude!"

    Linus Torvalds - He gave us the last piece to a free *nix. Who knows what would have happened to the GNU project without him.

    Richard Stallman - He started the GNU project. He also should probably be awarded a medal for the most misunderstood person in the industry. There is an equal amount of FUD directed at him as there is directed at GNU/Linux from Microsoft.

    Steve Wozniak - Come on, you can't forget this guy!

    Steve Jobs - Now here is someone who has had an interesting career. He's also the guy who started the push to make software "pretty". Just look at OS X.

    There's plenty of others.

  • How could anyone forget him. And what about Chuck Moore, inventor of FORTH? :-)
    • a complete list of interesting candidates can be found here [vt.edu]. alan definately has my vote, of course, i'm slightly biased in this, given that he's the father of my field (ai). unfortunately, 90+% of people don't know turing's full story --- a lot of people are surprised to find out that he started at bletchley park cracking enigma and ended up committing suicide thinking he was snow white (eating a poisoned apple). it was turing's stored program concept that was the foundation for the von neumann architecture, so in a sense turing is the father of computing in general. anyways, for more info, try here [alanturing.net] or here [vt.edu]

  • Gang of Four (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Samus ( 1382 )
    How about the guys who codified design patterns in the classic Design Patterns book? While I don't think you would really want to take up four of your rooms with each of their names you could just call it the Gang of Four room.
    You could also nominate James Gosling the Java guy. While I wouldn't really call Java all that innovative it has had a revolutionary impact like Larry Wall and Perl. I think you would more want names that when people say, "what did they guy who this room is named after do?" and you tell them to look it up they will be better coders for it. Thats why I nominate the Gang of Four name.
  • How about Brian Kernhigan?

    I know this doesnt exactly fit, but Jon Postel deserves an honor too.

  • Grace Hopper is a good one (Score:4, Interesting)

    by budalite ( 454527 ) on Friday January 10, 2003 @10:05AM (#5054287)
    Grace Murray Hopper (bio can be found at The History of Computing [thocp.net]), generally credited with "developing the first compiler and who led the effort in the 60's to develop COBOL." Cool lady.
    • she was also a rear admiral in the navy, coined the term, "debug" and had trouble balancing her check book because she thought in octal rather than decimal. there's also the fact that she was the first woman to recieve a ph.d. in mathematics from yale. more info here [vt.edu]. definately a cool chick ;-) byte magazine did a really nice bio on here in their 25th anniversary edition too.
  • Uhm... how the hell did he make it into that list?

    I've suffered under his misguided, outdated and usually just plain wrong ideas about process management. I've also met him and it simply confirmed the fact that this guy hasn't had an original idea in his life. He is so rigid and clueless that he shouldn't be allowed near a software company.

    Two projects. One run using his Team Software Process, the other run using a very watered down version of XP. The Team Software Process project was months late and was full of bugs. The XP project was delivered on time even though it was staffed with only about 80% of the manpower that was planned for.

    MMhhhh... might I suggest the Watts Humphrey Urinal?
  • John Carmack
    Alan Cox
    Bill Joy

  • How could you include Dennis Ritchie, but exclude
    Brian Kernighan?

    • K&R (Score:2)

      by spitzak ( 4019 )
      Yes! Definately Kernighan and Ritchie! People may say that Unix and C are no big deal, but the ability to simplify things down to a useful and easy to understand core is extremely important and the real reason why they succeeded. And unfortunately this ability seems to be missing today. We should all be running Plan9 with 17 system calls, not Linux with hundreds of system calls.

  • Bill Atkinson (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Codger ( 96717 ) on Friday January 10, 2003 @10:24AM (#5054419)
    Wrote much of the original Mac UI, wrote the revolutionary Quickdraw, wrote the first version of MacPaint, and invented HyperCard. If anyone belongs on this list, he does.

    Here's a brief profile on Apple.com: http://www.apple.com/creative/stories/atkinson/ [apple.com]

  • Dijkstra (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hard_Code ( 49548 ) on Friday January 10, 2003 @10:41AM (#5054525)
    How about the recently late Edsger Dijkstra.

    The day he passed, I printed out and tacked this quote to my cube:

    "I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself, "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well that would be enough immortality for me"
    --Edsger Dijkstra

    • Re:Dijkstra (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Hehe. You should have tacked it to the bathroom wall...

  • Herman Hollerith (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jjcohen ( 546500 )
    The father of the punchcard

  • Dave Cutler (Score:4, Insightful)

    by shoppa ( 464619 ) on Friday January 10, 2003 @10:49AM (#5054596)
    Dave Cutler, architect of RSX-11, VMS, and Windows NT. (For better and worse, in that order!)

  • Define innovators (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ivan Raikov ( 521143 ) on Friday January 10, 2003 @10:50AM (#5054600) Homepage
    With the exception of Donald Knuth, all of the names you list are of people who had mostly engineering contributions, as opposed to bringing scientific advancements in the field (although the two are somewhat related). Did you mean to exclude the people who created and formalized computer science? If not, then you most definitely want to include Alan Turing [turing.org.uk], Edsger Dijsktra [utexas.edu], C. Antony R. Hoare [ox.ac.uk], Niklaus Wirth [inf.ethz.ch], and Marvin Minsky [mit.edu].
  • A) One of the first computer professionals.

    B) Documented the first hardware 'bug' (literally, a bug).

    C) Among those responsible for one of the first extremely popular programming languages: COBOL.

    D) Looks like a sweet old grandmother in a Navy Uniform.

    E) The exception that proves the rule that all computer geeks are adolescent guys.

    F) Participated in both the private and governmental sectors. Truly a public servant.
  • Grace Hopper did fundamental work in the creation of the assembler and the compiler, creating the concept of "programming" and increasing the prodctivity of software creation by true orders of magnitude (unless you are one of those who prefer to do their programming in machine language, in which case the invention of the complier was a bad thing!).

    sPh

  • Memory fails me at the moment, but the man who developed the whole concept of relational databases... worked at IBM as I recall, and cape up with the concept of ACID: Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, Durable. I'm hoping a fellow /.'er can come up with the name for me (a quick google came up empty.) Imagine where'd we be today without RDBs!
    • C.J. Date, no? Damned if I can remember his actual first name, everyone just calls him C.J.

      Probably a bad name for a conference room. "The conference has been moved to Date." "Can we get Date for Friday?"
    • Memory fails me at the moment, but the man who developed the whole concept of relational databases... worked at IBM as I recall, and cape up with the concept of ACID: Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, Durable.

      Ted Codd [databaseanswers.com].
  • Miguel de Icaza

  • Grace Hopper (Score:2, Insightful)

    by SicariusMan ( 412699 )
    Not to be politically correct, but I think Rear Admiral Grace Hopper should definitly be on the list. After all she wrote the first compiler, A-O, then the successor FLOW-Matic, which then lead to COBOL. You can get a really good idea of all of her contributions to programming here [techtarget.com].
  • Mike Muuss [arl.mil] was the author of PING [arl.mil] which is found on nearly every system on the internet. PING is an excellent example of an open source contribution. From the website:

    Sadly, Mike Muuss was killed in an automobile accident on November 20, 2000. His work lives on in testament to his intellect and indomitable spirit -- Lee A. Butler

  • Alan Turing - Of course!
    John Carmack - Doom/Quake/graphics wizard
    Seymore Cray - Fast Computers
    Shawn Fanning - For making P2P popular and pissing off the RIAA
    Chris Montgomery - Vorbis/OGG visionary
    Larry Wall - There's more than one way to do it.
    Theo de Raadt - BSD
    Alan Cox - Linux god\
    Gordon Moore - Moore's Law

    Now some wierd ones....
    Bill Gates - for bringing dirty tricks to the computer industry.
    George W Bush - for his support of Data Mining technology.
    Al Gore - For Inventing the Internet
    Scott Manley - Crazy scotsman who while working as an astronomer (studying killer asteroids) decided to do mp3 radio and wrote the first mp3 streaming system, in about 15 lines of code this wasn't so much released as 'pasted into IRC for his friends' - of course... nobody knows who he is ;-)

  • Look at the Association for Computing Machinery's Outstanding Achievement (Turing [acm.org]) and Promising Young Profesional (Hopper [acm.org]) award winners. For example the Hopper award winners include Knuth, Woz, Bricklin (remember Visicalc?), Kurzweil (commercial AI), Joy (like vi? what about VM in unix?), and Ousterhout (TCL - embed a language!). Turing award winners also include Hamming, Newell, Hoare, etc - true giants in the field.

  • Man, I can't believe that no one else has mentioned Claude Shannon and Jon Postal yet. For those that aren't aware, Shannon did the pioneering work in information theory at Bell Labs, publishing the seminal paper for the field back in 1948. His work directly influenced the development of compression, cryptography, protocols for reliable storage and transfer of data, and influenced countless other aspects of computer science. Postal was the RFC Editor since the early days of the Internet / ARPAnet and authored or co-authored all of the key RFCs, such as for IP, TCP, UDP, etc.

    -"Zow"

  • Also known as the "Mother of modern programming." She coined the term "computer bug," worked heavily with the creation of cobol (I know, I know... but it was something when it was first created). She was also the first flag-rank female Naval Officer.
  • ... inventor of the computer mouse, shared-screen teleconferencing, hypermedia, groupware, and lots of other stuff.

  • $0.02 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Viqsi ( 534904 ) <jrhunter @ m enagerie.tf> on Friday January 10, 2003 @01:55PM (#5056281)
    Here's a few I'd want to second:

    Adm. Grace Hopper
    Bill Atkinson
    Bill Joy
    John Carmack
    James Gosling
    Tim Berners-Lee

    I hesitate a bit to put Richard Stallman on that list; arguably his is more of a social creation.
  • Marin Fowler: Refactoring. Making code Maintainable.

    Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides: AKA the Gang of Four

    Kent Beck:

    John Galt:

  • Ward Christensen (Score:3, Informative)

    by netringer ( 319831 ) <maaddr-slashdot@NospaM.yahoo.com> on Friday January 10, 2003 @03:28PM (#5057282) Journal
    He co-invented exactly what 'cher doing here, using a computerized bulletin board system or CBBS. While Randy Suess built the S-100 Z80 computer, Ward wrote CBBS in assembler in less than a month one snowy Chicago winter in 1975.

    Ward later wrote the MODEM protocol which was the first file transfer protocol.

    When I started sniffing around the computign scene we found that a lot of the things utilties that you needed to do things were already written and given away by Ward Christensen. He also invented freeware.

  • Gary Kildall (Score:2, Insightful)

    by littlea1 ( 546253 )
    I think that you should include Gary Kildall before any of the people that are alive. You can check more on: http://www.digitalcentury.com/encyclo/update/kilda ll.html

  • Ted Nelson (Score:2, Insightful)

    by metamatic ( 202216 )
    I can't believe nobody has mentioned Ted Nelson, inventor of hypertext and hypermedia.
  • whatever manager it is that lets you sit around pondering what to name your Conference rooms. Sounds like a pretty innovative concept.
  • Al Gore

    Moderate me down if you want, trolls. I still find it funny.

Slashdot Top Deals

Love may laugh at locksmiths, but he has a profound respect for money bags. -- Sidney Paternoster, "The Folly of the Wise"

Close