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CPO at https://t.co/BNZzlkTfVp. Founder of https://t.co/hOAmca8qLm and https://t.co/dRwgbZCSOw. Coffee-making, parenting, building, exploring: RU → CN → NZ → CL → UK → NZ → PL → UK?
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.
No one is coming to save your startup. It’s on you and that’s the best part. You got this. Keep going.
Founder and CEO of @acquiredotcom. https://t.co/wRMIssDmhl has helped 100s of startups get acquired and facilitated $500m+ in closed deals.
blue skies forever, QED.
Market Design/Entrepreneurship Professor @HarvardHBS & Faculty Affiliate @Harvard Economics; Research @a16zcrypto; Editor @restatjournal; Econ @Quora; … | #QED
222ooo the moon!
building @snappify_io & @VemetricHQ
