I strongly recommend everyone (especially non-techies) read the discussion “Who are/were some of the most badass computer programmers?” at Quora. It’s too easy for non-programmers – even for programmers – to forget that all software, at its foundation, is written by human beings. Everything is somebody’s baby. Just turns out that some mommies and daddies are WAY more badass than others.
My list of utter badasses would include the following:
- Ada Lovelace
- Alan Turing
- Dennis Ritchie
- Donald Knuth
- Jeff Dean
- Linus Torvalds
- Richard Stallman
- Steve Wozniak
- Tim Berners-Lee
Check out the Wikipedia pages I linked to, and realize just how much they shaped the world we live in.
Seymore Cray
Ref. This tongue-in-cheek letter: http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html
Good call on Cray. And I remember that letter. It’s hilarious. I read it republished on the web as an undergrad in 1996 or so.
[Real Programmers don’t use] compilers with array bounds checking. They stifle creativity, destroy most of the interesting uses for EQUIVALENCE, and make it impossible to modify the operating system code with negative subscripts.
The letter is pure gold.
Seeing Woz there, it reminded me of how Jobs stole what he had to offer! Also, Dennis Ritchie!