Most Influential Software Programmers of All Time People
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Most Influential Software Programmers of All Time

The most influential software programmers of all time are the innovative and brilliant men and women who each contributed something ground-breaking to the software programming world. These are the pioneers of programming all having created, evolved or improved upon the foundations of modern computer programming. Plain and simple, without these software programming legends, computers, the Internet and many of your favorite programs would never exist.

Selecting which software programmer is the absolute most influential is often a chicken and egg conundrum. Without the earlyprogramming languages like FORTRAN, created by John Backus, or the C programming language, created by Dennis Ritchie, newer languages would never exist. But newer programmers, such as Tim Berners-Lee, who created HTML, James Gosling, who created Java, or Rasmus Lerdorf, who created PHP, improved upon those early innovations to create bigger and better things. 

Others might argue that it's not the programming language authors that should be considered the most influential but those who used programming to make computer science accessible to the average person. Microsoft, co-founded by the famous Bill Gates, changed the world, as did Google, created by the team of Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But is their influence on the tech world more important than that of the software language creators?

Who are the most famous computer programmers? In the end, software programming and the Internet was not created overnight and certainly not by one person or company. It's a combination of each software programmer's innovations that has brought us to where we are today. The great thing about programming is that it's always evolving and improving. Who knows, maybe the most influential software programmer ever hasn't even discovered his or her big thing yet. Until then, vote on which notable software programmeryou think is the most influential of all time.

Check out more lists like the top game programmers, the best hackers of all time, and the most influential tech bloggers. 
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    Died at 70 (1941-2011)C programming language creator
  2. 2
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    age 46Linus kernel creator
  3. 3
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    age 77Father of the analysis of algorithms
  4. 4
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    age 72UNIX co-creator
  5. 5
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    age 60HTML and world wide web inventor

  7. 6
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    age 65C++ creator
  8. 7
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    age 73UNIX co-creator
  9. 8
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    age 62GNU Project creator
  10. 9
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    age 60Java creator
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    Died at 37 (1815-1852)World's first computer programmer
  12. 11
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    age 81Pascal designer
  13. 12
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    added by J.l.QuelchDied at 86 (1906-1992)COBOL creator
  14. 13
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    age 59Python creator
  15. 14
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    age 47PHP creator
  16. 15
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    age 42Google co-founder

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    age 40BitTorrent creator
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    Died at 83 (1924-2007)FORTRAN creator
  20. 18
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    added by JeffDarcyDied at 72 (1930-2002)
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    age 54JavaScript creator
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    age 45id Software co-founder
  23. 21
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    age 61Perl creator
  24. 22
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    added by arunage 53MySQL creator
  25. 23
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    age 42Google co-founder
  26. 24
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    age 58Introduced multitasking to personal computers
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    added by HaydenJoyage 61
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    added by evilgrin32Died at 38 (1962-2000)Creator of the ZIP archive format 
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    added by GeneMarcAngeloJrage 50Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto is the creator of the Ruby language. 
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    age 55Turbo Pascal author
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    added by JeffDarcyDied at 84 (1927-2011)
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    added by arunage 72PostgreSQL, ingres
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    added by arunLucene, Nutch, Hadoop Creator
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    added by arunNumPy creator
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    added by EdwardHillage 50
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    age 31WordPress founder
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    age 63Visual Basic pioneer
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    added by evilgrin32Martin Fowlerage 52
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    added by evilgrin32Kai Krauseage 58
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    added by AtipatWattanuntachaiage 44Paypal creator 
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    added by AtipatWattanuntachaiage 31
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    added by arunRedis NoSQL Database
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