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What are the big contemporary names in the programming field?

I am sorry if it is a duplicate questions or is useless. I want to compile a list of influential people in our industry who can be termed as "opinionated" and thought leaders. There are basically two characteristics that I'm referring to here:

  1. The person has introduced new concepts/terminology/trends or talked about existing ones in thought provoking way.
  2. Majority or part of the writings are available online.

Some of the people who I think as thought leaders are as under:

  1. Martin Fowler Known for domain specific languages, Active Record, IoC.
  2. Joel Spolsky known for his 12 point Joel test, Law of Leaky abstractions.
  3. Kent Beck known for XP.
  4. Paul Graham.

Any other names and links?

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Only living people or would for example Alan Turing be on the list? Only IT people or maybe mathematicians who do work strongly related to IT? – thorsten müller Jun 23 '11 at 19:10

migrated from stackoverflow.com Jun 23 '11 at 18:58

marked as duplicate by Wayne M, back2dos, FrustratedWithFormsDesigner, Anna Lear♦ Jun 23 '11 at 20:28

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9 Answers

up vote 11 down vote

The classics seem underrepresented so far.

  1. Edsger Dijkstra, many algorithms, essays, etc. Among other things, the author of Go To Statement Considered Harmful.
  2. Donald Knuth, need I say anything more?
  3. Steve McConnell, authors of books such as Code Complete, Rapid Development and Software Estimation.
  4. Fred Brooks, the author of The Mythical Man-Month.
  5. Vint Cerf, helped create the internet.
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3  
Excellent candidates! In the spirit of your answer, I would suggest Tony (aka C. A. R.) Hoare, inventor of the QuickSort algorithm in particular and many other contributions to computer science. His 1980 Turing Award lecture, The Emperor's Old Clothes, is one of my top-ten most-influential documents. – Adam Crossland Jun 23 '11 at 19:36
+1 for Donald Knuth – BrokenGlass Jun 23 '11 at 19:47
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I'm almost tempted to downvote -- trying to put Steve McConnell in he same class as the others you've mentioned is clearly just wrong. He seems to be all right, but not even close to the likes of Knuth, Brooks, or Dijkstra. – Jerry Coffin Jun 23 '11 at 21:40
up vote 9 down vote
  1. Robert C. Martin, a.k.a. Uncle Bob; great explanations of the theory behind cohesion vs. coupling
  2. Pragmatic Programmers, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas; how to be a better programmer
  3. Gerald M. Weinberg; how to be a better person (/consultant)
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+1 for Uncle Bob – BrokenGlass Jun 23 '11 at 19:48
up vote 6 down vote

Linus Torvalds -- Linux, Git, the practice of large-scale open source development generally

Richard Stallman -- GNU, Emacs, the philosophy of open source development

David Heinemeier Hansson -- Ruby on Rails, 37 Signals-style design and work-style philosophies. Also, opinionated.

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up vote 4 down vote
  • Martin Fowler
  • Kent Beck
  • Robert Martin
  • Linus Torvalds
  • Pragmatic programmers (Andy and Dave)
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up vote 3 down vote

Erik Meijer. Very opinionated, an entertaining speaker, and influential in the world of language design, particularly in purely functional languages. Check out his videos on Channel 9.

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up vote 2 down vote

adding these guys:

  • Greg Young. IL/Contracts/CQRS/ES/DDD (codebetter.com new Addison Westley book in Nov)
  • Scott Bellware. BDD/Community/Activism/Practices
  • Eric Evans DDD
  • Michael Feathers Refactoring/TDD/Languages
  • Oren Eini (ayende.com) ORM/NoSQL/OSS/productivity king
  • Jeremy Miller .NET/patterns/AAT
  • Rob Conery polyglot

and who can forget

  • Linus Torvalds

disagree on Spolsky being here at all

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Plus 1, including comment abaout Spolsky. – Peter Ritchie Jun 23 '11 at 19:33
+1 for Michael Feathers – Matthew Rodatus Jun 23 '11 at 20:14
up vote 2 down vote

Dave Hoover - Apprenticeship @redsquirrel

Corey Haines - Software Craftsmanship @coreyhaines

Chad Fowler - Pragmatic Practice @chadfowler

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up vote 1 down vote

I would add scottgu and wait for negative votes

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Very much agree with Scott Gu, but then again I am mainly a MS stack developer. – Adam Crossland Jun 23 '11 at 20:14
up vote -2 down vote

[Tim O'Reilly][1] Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly books - He's amazing is so is his feed.

[Michael Brevig][2] #shameless plug -- PHP Developer, Cyclist, Freemason and opinion generated ranter

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So where's your blog kinda thing? – Mohsin Hijazee Jun 23 '11 at 19:09
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-1 for the "shameless plug". The fact it is your single answer on Programmers.SE (at least as I write this) make it worse. – Vitor Braga Jun 23 '11 at 20:07

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