Programming Pioneers: People You Need to Know

CS467 Blog #6

Image by izoca from Pixabay

After reading through The Innovators by Walter Isaacson and Hackers by Steven Levy, I was inspired to continue to learn more about the history of computer science and its founding fathers. I wanted to lock into my memory the top software engineers in history. Therefore, from the rabbit hole that I went down, I will share with you the top 3 software engineers of the 21st century (in my own opinion):

1. Dennis Ritchie – Creator of the C Language

Dennis Ritchie is considered to be one of the founding fathers of modern computing. His contributions to computer science has paved way to innovations that led to the state of technology we all enjoy today. Dennis Ritchie received the Turing Award in 1983 which is considered to be the highest award in computer science. He received this award, along side his partner, Ken Thompson, for their development of the Unix operating system and for the development of generic operating systems theory.

Dennis originally created the B programming language developed when Ritchie was working at Bell Laboratories around 1969. He then updated the B language to apply to the Unix utilities that him and Thompson were developing. Thus, the C programming language was thus born and became wildly popular in the 1980s and was standardized by ANSI and ISO.

While not typically a household name, Dennis Ritchie has left his fingerprints inside of the majority of our electronic devices today.

More can be learned about Dennis Ritchie through the YouTube channel, Computerphile.

2. Linus Torvalds – Creator of the Linux Kernel and Git

One of the living legends and the top computer science rock star is Linus Torvalds. This 51 year old Finnish-American open-source software engineer is best known for leading the development of the Linux kernel. The first version was released in 1991 and started with a few files of code and now has over 23 million lines of code thanks to it being open source.

Linus is a pioneer of the open-source community. His philosophy on software is opposite that of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Linus paved a path for the open-source community and has been a leader of several open-source projects.

With all of these open-source projects, it quickly became a nightmare trying to manage the different files and versions that were floating around the internet. So Linus made the open-source Git version control system. There were other VCS solutions out there at the time, but none (that were robust enough) were open-source. If you are curious like me, the word, ‘git’ means “unpleasant person” in British slang.

To better understand the mind of Linus, you can watch his TED talk on YouTube

3. Guido van Rossum – Creator of Python Language

I may be a bit biased here since I primarily write code in Python, but Guido van Rossum (also known as the Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL)), is the Dutch author of the Python programming language which was released in 1991.

Believe it or not, Python was born out of the boredom of Guido. During downtime at the office, Guido needed a hobby project to keep himself occupied and chose to write a new scripting language he had been working on and off on. The name Python comes from Guido’s admiration of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Python is based on a programming language called, ABC, which Guido helped develop. ABC language was designed to be an easy to read high-level programming language that could replace the BASIC programming language. The principles of ABC transferred over to Python and over the several years since its initial release, Python is now the most popular programming language .

A Token of Appreciation

Image by StartupStockPhotos from Pixabay

We can all thank the many founding fathers of computer science that shaped the world we live in today. These people paved paths to our careers, our friends, our family, and our lives. Learning about the history of computing is the least we can do to pay our respects.