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Linus Torvalds Leads Over Alan Turing, Tim Berners-Lee, Dennis Ritchie, and RMS

Linus Torvalds Leads Over Alan Turing, Tim Berners-Lee, Dennis Ritchie, and RMS
By Jeremy Geelan
Article Rating:
December 12, 2004 12:00 AM EST
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 14,430
Related Links:
  • The i-Technology Right Stuff: Searching for the Twenty Top Software People in the World
  • Sung and Unsung i-Technology Heroes
  • Wanted: 19 More of the Top Software People in the World

    It began, as these things often do, as a chance remark, in a blog. Now it has grown to a Web-wide search for the best software people alive and dead. The best ever.

    The tiny acorn was born when Tim Bray in his popular Ongoing blog described Adam Bosworth - of Quattro Pro, Microsoft Access, IE4, then BEA and now Google fame - as "probably one of the top 20 software people in the world."

    The search for the remaining 19 began, and resulted in a list of forty nominees that are now being discussed and voted on by anyone interested in i-Technology and its software development pioneers.

    Currently the leading ten - as of today (Sunday) - are as follows (but it is changing by the hour as votes come in):

    1. Linus Torvalds: "Benevolent dictator" of the Linux kernel
    2. Alan Turing: Mathematician; author of the 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
    3. Richard Stallman: Free software movement's leading figure; founder of the GNU Project
    4. Dennis Ritchie: Creator of C and Coinventor of Unix
    5. Tim Berners-Lee: "Father of the World Wide Web" and expectant father of the Semantic Web
    6. Ken Thompson: Coinventor of Unix
    7. Bjarne Stroustrup: The designer and original implementor of C++
    8. Guido van Rossum: Author of the Python programming language
    9. Bill Joy: Cofounder and former chief scientist of Sun; main author of Berkeley Unix
    10. Brian Kernighan: One of the creators of the AWK and AMPL languages

    Related Links:

  • The i-Technology Right Stuff: Searching for the Twenty Top Software People in the World
  • Sung and Unsung i-Technology Heroes
  • Wanted: 19 More of the Top Software People in the World

    • Published December 12, 2004 – Reads 14,430
    Copyright © 2004 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
    Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

    More Stories By Jeremy Geelan

    Jeremy Geelan is President & COO of Cloud Expo, Inc. and Conference Chair of the worldwide Cloud Expo series. He appears regularly at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences both in North America and overseas. He is executive producer and presenter of Cloud Expo's "Power Panels" on SYS-CON.TV.

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    Most Recent Comments
    Expand This Please 12/11/04 05:05:27 PM EST

    Will there be a chance to expand this one day to some kind of Top 100? The search for 20 is clearly proving too restrictive and the many suggestions here are brilliant - maybe a Mk 2 version of this poll can be created?
    Undf65 12/11/04 04:51:31 PM EST

    I'm not sure what's the best part, the discussion about who's missing, or the splendid backup pages illustrating each nominee's claim to be in the top twenty. This is a great resource, keep it up!

    If Linus wins, that'll be the icing on the cake - but the oppositon is very, very, VERY tough.