Programmers
34 profiles
Technology
Yukihiro Matsumoto
Japanese programmer who created the Ruby programming language
Born 1965
Technology
Kevin Systrom
Co-founder of Instagram
Born 1983
Science
Ken Thompson
Co-creator of Unix and the B language, and co-designer of Go
Born 1943
Technology
John Romero
Game designer who co-created Doom and Quake at id Software
Born 1967
Technology
John McAfee
Founder of McAfee antivirus and a controversial public figure
1945 – 2021
Technology
John Carmack
Programmer behind Doom and Quake and pioneer of 3D games and VR
Born 1970
Science
John Backus
IBM engineer who led the creation of Fortran, the first widely used high-level language
1924 – 2007
Technology
Joe Armstrong
British computer scientist who co-created the Erlang programming language
1950 – 2019
Science
Jean E. Sammet
Programming-language pioneer who helped design COBOL
1928 – 2017
Technology
Yuji Naka
Programmer who co-created Sonic the Hedgehog at Sega
Born 1965
Technology
Vitalik Buterin
Russian-Canadian programmer who co-founded Ethereum
Born 1994
Technology
Tom Preston-Werner
GitHub co-founder who created Gravatar, Jekyll and TOML
Born 1979
Technology
Tobias Lütke
German-Canadian founder and CEO of Shopify
Tim Paterson
Programmer who wrote 86-DOS, which became Microsoft’s MS-DOS
Born 1956
Technology
Sid Meier
Creator of the Civilization strategy-game series
Born 1954
Music
Shawn Fanning
Creator of Napster, the first popular peer-to-peer music service
Born 1980
Technology
Satoru Iwata
Programmer turned Nintendo president who launched the DS and Wii
1959 – 2015
Technology
Salvatore Sanfilippo
Italian programmer who created the Redis database
Born 1977
Technology
Richard Stallman
Founder of the free software movement and the GNU Project
Born 1953
Technology
Paul Graham
Co-founder of Y Combinator and influential essayist on start-ups
Born 1964
Technology
Nat Friedman
Former GitHub CEO who launched Copilot and now leads product at Meta Superintelligence Labs
Born 1977
Technology
Michael Widenius
Finnish programmer who created MySQL and MariaDB
Born 1962
Technology
Markus Persson
Swedish creator of Minecraft, the best-selling video game in history
Born 1979
Technology
Mark Zuckerberg
Co-founder and CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta
Born 1984