PostThe Faces Behind Popular Programming Languages

C

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (born September 9, 1941) is an American computer scientist notable for his influence on C and other programming languages, and on operating systems such as Multics and Unix. He received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007.

PHP

Rasmus Lerdorf

Rasmus Lerdorf (born on November 22nd, 1968 in Qeqertarsuaq, Greenland) is a Danish-Greenlandic programmer and is most notable as the creator of the PHP programming language. He authored the first two versions.

Java

James Gosling

James Gosling – In 1977, James Gosling received a B.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary. In 1983, he earned a Ph.D in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and his doctoral thesis was titled “The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints”. While working towards his doctorate, he wrote a version of emacs (gosmacs), and before joining Sun Microsystems he built a multi-processor version of Unix while at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as several compilers and mail systems.

Since 1984, Gosling has been with Sun Microsystems, and is generally known best as the father of the Java programming language.

Javascript

Brendan Beich

Brendan Eich (born 1961) is a computer programmer and creator of the JavaScript programming language. He is the Chief Technology Officer at the Mozilla Corporation.

Perl

Larry Wall

Larry Wall (born September 27, 1954) is a programmer and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987.

Ruby

Yukihiro Matsumoto

Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matsumoto Yukihiro, a.k.a. Matz, born 14 April 1965) is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language and its reference implementation, Matz’s Ruby Interpreter (MRI). He was born in Osaka Prefecture, in western Honshū. According to an interview conducted by Japan Inc., he was a self-taught programmer until the end of high school. He graduated with an information science degree from Tsukuba University, where he associated himself with research departments dealing with programming languages and compilers.

Ruby on Rails (Not a Programming Language | Added As Bonus)

David Heinemeier Hansson

David Heinemeier Hansson is a Danish programmer and the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework and the Instiki wiki. He is also a partner at the web-based software development firm 37signals.

Python

Guido van Rossum

Guido van Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language. In the Python community, Van Rossum is known as a “Benevolent Dictator for Life” (BDFL), meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary. He is currently employed by Google, where he spends half his time working on Python development.

Pascal

Niklaus E. Wirth

Niklaus Emil Wirth (born February 15, 1934) is a Swiss computer scientist, best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984 he won the Turing Award for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages.

[ Thank you cb791585 for the additions. Added to the post ]

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Comments 9 Responses to “The Faces Behind Popular Programming Languages”

  1. I just need to clarify that Ruby on Rails is a framework and not a language.
    In other words,Rails is a framework built on Ruby language.

  2. D00d, RoR ain’t a language!

  3. Thank you khelll and kodeninja. But it says this in the post:

    “the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework and the Instiki wiki.”

  4. But where are these guy’s…

    Java – James Gosling
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling

    C – Dennis Ritchie
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie

    HTML – Timothy John Berners-Lee
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

    Pascal – Niklaus Emil Wirth
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth

  5. What is it about the Danish?

  6. But it says as the title of the post:

    The Faces Behind Popular Programming Languages

  7. We danes are are just born with computers 😀

    The inventor of C++ and C# were Danish too 😀

  8. @cb791585: HTML is not a programming language, it’s a formatting language.

    @SeanJA: Hate to break this to you, but just because the trendy web crowd isn’t into a language, or it doesn’t show up on Digg often, does not mean it isn’t popular with those who actually build a vast amount of the computer systems out there. For example… most operating systems, network stacks, and most of the server services that make the Internet what it is today, are written in C.

  9. wow.. What a great peoples. Hats off to you guys.