ThoughtStormsGurus

Quora Answer : Who is a computer programmer you look up to?

Jun 26, 2018

I guess my canon is :

Alan Kay, inventor of Smalltalk and the OO way.

Ward Cunningham, inventor of wiki and many great ideas

Kent Beck, xTreme Programming

Dan Bricklin, inventor of the spreadsheet

Dave Winer, the original uber-blogger, inventor of many great ideas in social software (some of which have survived, others have been side-lined but often replaced by something worse.) But mainly because of the way he integrates his philosophy of software with his philosophy of life, and of being a public figure via his blog : Scripting News

Joel Spolsky is pretty shrewd about the social aspects of software too.

Rich Hickey, inventor of Clojure. The best designed language I've ever used.

Joe Armstrong (https://joearms.github.io/) inventor of Erlang.

I guess I should credit John McCarthy, inventor of Lisp and a lot of AI stuff. And I do, I just wasn't really aware of much about him. Similar with Knuth. Maybe I should look into Seymour Papert too.