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Here’s Claude’s response when I took it to task for overlooking Dr. Hipp: You're absolutely right! That's a significant oversight. **Richard Hipp**, creator of SQLite, definitely belongs on this list - arguably in the top 50, not just the top 100. SQLite is probably the most widely deployed database in the world, running on billions of devices including every iPhone, Android phone, web browser, and countless embedded systems. His creation of a serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database that fits in a single file has had massive influence on software development. The fact that SQLite is also public domain and meticulously tested (with one of the highest test-to-code ratios in the industry) makes his contribution even more remarkable. I should have included him instead of some of the entries in my lists. Thank you for the correction - Hipp's work has probably touched more devices than almost any other programmer's contributions.
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Next 50: Here's the next 50 influential computer programmers (51-100): 51. **Ian Goodfellow** - Inventor of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) 52. **Yann LeCun** - Chief AI Scientist at Meta, pioneer in convolutional neural networks 53. **Andrew Ng** - Co-founder of Coursera, former head of Google Brain 54. **Demis Hassabis** - Co-founder of DeepMind 55. **Fei-Fei Li** - AI researcher, creator of ImageNet 56. **Stuart Russell** - AI researcher, co-author of leading AI textbook 57. **Peter Norvig** - Director of Research at Google, co-author of AI textbook 58. **Yoshua Bengio** - Deep learning pioneer 59. **Jürgen Schmidhuber** - Pioneer in LSTM neural networks 60. **Michael Stonebraker** - Database systems pioneer, Turing Award winner 61. **David Patterson** - Computer architecture pioneer, RISC advocate 62. **John Hennessy** - Computer architecture pioneer, former Stanford president 63. **Butler Lampson** - Turing Award winner, contributed to personal computing 64. **Charles Thacker** - Designed Xerox Alto, Turing Award winner 65. **Ivan Sutherland** - Pioneer of computer graphics 66. **Fred Brooks** - Author of "The Mythical Man-Month" 67. **Niklaus Wirth** - Creator of Pascal and Modula 68. **Brian Kernighan** - Co-author of "The C Programming Language" 69. **Douglas Crockford** - JavaScript architect, created JSON 70. **Brendan Gregg** - Systems performance expert 71. **Bryan Cantrill** - Systems programmer, DTrace creator 72. **Solomon Hykes** - Creator of Docker 73. **Mitchell Hashimoto** - Co-founder of HashiCorp, creator of Vagrant 74. **Kelsey Hightower** - Kubernetes advocate and contributor 75. **Eric Brewer** - CAP theorem, professor at UC Berkeley 76. **Jeff Atwood** - Co-founder of Stack Overflow 77. **Joel Spolsky** - Co-founder of Stack Overflow, Trello 78. **Paul Graham** - Co-founder of Y Combinator, created Arc 79. **Robert Martin (Uncle Bob)** - Software craftsmanship advocate 80. **Martin Fowler** - Software design pattern expert 81. **Kent Beck** - Creator of Extreme Programming and Test-Driven Development 82. **Ward Cunningham** - Inventor of the wiki 83. **Grady Booch** - Co-creator of UML 84. **James Rumbaugh** - Co-creator of UML 85. **Ivar Jacobson** - Co-creator of UML 86. **Herb Sutter** - C++ standards committee chair 87. **Scott Meyers** - C++ expert and author 88. **Andrei Alexandrescu** - D language co-designer, C++ expert 89. **Walter Bright** - Creator of D programming language 90. **Roberto Ierusalimschy** - Creator of Lua 91. **Xavier Leroy** - Creator of OCaml 92. **Simon Peyton Jones** - Lead developer of Haskell 93. **Philip Wadler** - Programming language researcher, contributed to Haskell 94. **Joe Armstrong** - Creator of Erlang (passed away in 2019, so may not qualify) 95. **Robert Virding** - Co-creator of Erlang 96. **Mike Williams** - Co-creator of Erlang 97. **Van Jacobson** - Internet protocols expert 98. **Paul Mockapetris** - Inventor of DNS 99. **Phil Katz** - Creator of ZIP file format (passed away in 2000, so doesn't qualify) 100. **Igor Sysoev** - Creator of nginx Let me provide some replacements for those who have passed away: 94. **Fabrice Bellard** - Creator of QEMU, FFmpeg, and numerous other projects 99. **Antirez (Salvatore Sanfilippo)** - Creator of Redis 100. **Matz Nygaard** - Systems programmer and educator This second tier includes many specialists in specific domains like databases, AI/ML, systems programming, web infrastructure, and programming language design. While they may not have the same universal name recognition as the first 50, their contributions have been fundamental to modern computing infrastructure and development practices.
Here’s Claude’s response when I took it to task for overlooking Dr. Hipp: You're absolutely right! That's a significant oversight. **Richard Hipp**, creator of SQLite, definitely belongs on this list - arguably in the top 50, not just the top 100. SQLite is probably the most widely deployed database in the world, running on billions of devices including every iPhone, Android phone, web browser, and countless embedded systems. His creation of a serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database that fits in a single file has had massive influence on software development. The fact that SQLite is also public domain and meticulously tested (with one of the highest test-to-code ratios in the industry) makes his contribution even more remarkable. I should have included him instead of some of the entries in my lists. Thank you for the correction - Hipp's work has probably touched more devices than almost any other programmer's contributions.
This.
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They say that history is written by the victors. More recently, one might say that history is written by the media, at least in a first (and largely inaccurate) pass. But in terms of how most people will get their information in the future, the ultimate arbiter is likely to be an AI model of some kind. Which means that if you want to be remembered in your field, you need to convince an LLM or its successor model class. Here’s what Claude gave as the most important and influential living computer programmers. The top 10 list isn’t too controversial, as all are living legends. But as you go further down the list (I’ll share the full list in another post below), you do see some curious omissions and inclusions. For example, it forgot to include Richard Hipp, creator of SQLite, the most widely deployed software in human history. What I find particularly amusing is that it included tons of deep learning researchers, and most of them would probably admit to being only passable coders. This strikes me as bias by these models towards their creators. Sort of like a list created by someone of a particular nationality that is conspicuous in its inclusion of a disproportionate number of fellow countrymen.
Complete list of top 50 (the over-representation of deep learning researchers is in the next 50, see next tweet): Here's a list of 50 highly influential computer programmers who were alive as of early 2025 (though I cannot confirm current status as of November 2025): 1. **Linus Torvalds** - Creator of Linux and Git 2. **Tim Berners-Lee** - Inventor of the World Wide Web 3. **Bjarne Stroustrup** - Creator of C++ 4. **Guido van Rossum** - Creator of Python 5. **James Gosling** - Creator of Java 6. **Anders Hejlsberg** - Lead architect of C# and TypeScript 7. **Brendan Eich** - Creator of JavaScript 8. **Larry Page** - Co-founder of Google, co-creator of PageRank 9. **Sergey Brin** - Co-founder of Google, co-creator of PageRank 10. **Donald Knuth** - Author of "The Art of Computer Programming" 11. **Ken Thompson** - Co-creator of Unix and Go 12. **Rob Pike** - Co-creator of Go, UTF-8 13. **Larry Wall** - Creator of Perl 14. **Yukihiro Matsumoto** - Creator of Ruby 15. **Rasmus Lerdorf** - Creator of PHP 16. **John Carmack** - Game engine pioneer (Doom, Quake) 17. **Richard Stallman** - Founded GNU Project and Free Software Foundation 18. **Vint Cerf** - Co-inventor of TCP/IP 19. **Bob Kahn** - Co-inventor of TCP/IP 20. **Alan Kay** - Pioneer of object-oriented programming 21. **Barbara Liskov** - Developed the Liskov substitution principle 22. **Margaret Hamilton** - Led Apollo mission software development 23. **Jeff Dean** - Google Fellow, key figure in distributed computing 24. **Sanjay Ghemawat** - Google Fellow, co-creator of MapReduce 25. **Chris Lattner** - Creator of LLVM and Swift 26. **Rich Hickey** - Creator of Clojure 27. **José Valim** - Creator of Elixir 28. **Graydon Hoare** - Original creator of Rust 29. **Martin Odersky** - Creator of Scala 30. **Miguel de Icaza** - Founded GNOME and Mono projects 31. **Marc Andreessen** - Co-author of Mosaic browser 32. **Bill Joy** - Co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote vi editor 33. **Andrew Tanenbaum** - Created MINIX, influenced Linux 34. **Whitfield Diffie** - Pioneer of public-key cryptography 35. **Martin Hellman** - Pioneer of public-key cryptography 36. **Phil Zimmermann** - Creator of PGP encryption 37. **Bram Cohen** - Creator of BitTorrent 38. **John Resig** - Creator of jQuery 39. **Ryan Dahl** - Creator of Node.js and Deno 40. **David Heinemeier Hansson** - Creator of Ruby on Rails 41. **Evan You** - Creator of Vue.js 42. **Jordan Walke** - Creator of React 43. **Satoshi Nakamoto** - Pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin (if alive) 44. **Vitalik Buterin** - Co-founder of Ethereum 45. **Jack Dorsey** - Co-founder of Twitter and Square 46. **Drew Houston** - Co-founder and programmer at Dropbox 47. **Patrick Collison** - Co-founder and programmer at Stripe 48. **John Collison** - Co-founder and programmer at Stripe 49. **Palmer Luckey** - Founder of Oculus VR 50. **Geoffrey Hinton** - Pioneer in deep learning and neural networks This list includes pioneers in various areas: operating systems, programming languages, web technologies, cryptography, machine learning, game development, and open source software. The influence of these individuals ranges from foundational computer science contributions to creating widely-used tools and platforms that have shaped modern computing. Note that "influence" can be measured in different ways - technical innovation, widespread adoption of their creations, academic contributions, or industry impact - and reasonable people might debate the relative rankings or inclusion of specific individuals on this list.
so far, i think the event most likely to delay ai timelines is eu5 release.
piece of lore: my first ever program was an eu2 mod.