Items12The creator’s order
  1. 1Gary KildallGary KildallBorn 19 May 1942CP/M and the portable operating system. Kildall wrote the PL/M language for Intel's microprocessors and then CP/M, an operating system whose hardware-specific code sat in a separate layer, the BIOS, so the same software could run on many different microcomputers. Digital Research, which he founded…0i
  2. 2Paul AllenPaul AllenProgramming languages as a business. Allen and Bill Gates wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 in 1975, with Allen building an Altair emulator on a university minicomputer so they could develop it before seeing the real machine. Microsoft's first products were language tools such as BASIC,…0i
  3. 3Philippe KahnPhilippe KahnBorn 16 Mar 1952The cheap, fast compiler. Kahn, a French mathematician, co-founded Borland in California in 1983 and sold Turbo Pascal, written by Danish programmer Anders Hejlsberg, for $49.95 through magazine adverts, when compilers usually cost hundreds of dollars. Editing, compiling and running in one fast…0i
  4. 4Michael TiemannMichael TiemannSelling support for free software. Tiemann wrote the first native-code C++ compiler, g++, for the GNU project, and in 1989 co-founded Cygnus Support with John Gilmore and David Henkel-Wallace to sell maintenance, porting and support for free tools such as GCC and GDB to companies building embedded…0i
  5. 5Michael WideniusMichael WideniusBorn 3 Mar 1962The free database behind the early web. Widenius, a Finnish programmer known as Monty, wrote most of MySQL's early code, and in 1995 co-founded MySQL AB in Sweden with David Axmark and Allan Larsson, offering the database free under an open-source licence and selling commercial licences and…0i
  6. 6Miguel de IcazaMiguel de IcazaBorn 23 Nov 1972Open-source .NET and cross-platform apps. De Icaza, from Mexico City, co-founded the GNOME desktop project in 1997 and then led Mono, an open-source version of Microsoft's .NET platform. In 2011 he and Nat Friedman founded Xamarin, which let developers write iPhone and Android apps in C# and share…0i
  7. 7Dries BuytaertDries BuytaertAn open-source framework and a company to support it. Buytaert started Drupal as a student project in Antwerp in 2001, a content management framework built from modules that developers could combine and extend, which grew a large volunteer community and ran sites for governments and universities.…0i
  8. 8David Heinemeier HanssonDavid Heinemeier HanssonBorn 15 Oct 1979Ruby on Rails. Heinemeier Hansson, a Danish programmer working for the small firm that became 37signals, extracted the web framework behind its Basecamp product and released it as Ruby on Rails in 2004. Its conventions over configuration and built-in tools for databases and testing let small teams…0i
  9. 9Joel SpolskyJoel SpolskyWriting about how software teams work. Spolsky, a former Microsoft Excel programme manager, co-founded Fog Creek Software in 2000, whose bug tracker FogBugz and blog Joel on Software, with its twelve-point Joel Test of team practices, shaped how many developers judged employers. In 2008 he…0i
  10. 10Jeff AtwoodJeff AtwoodAnswers that rank. Atwood, author of the Coding Horror blog, co-founded Stack Overflow in 2008 and designed much of how it works: questions and answers voted up or down, reputation points and badges earned by helping, and editing by trusted users. For over a decade it was where developers found…0i