Thousands, too many to name. If you read lots of code and books, you will be humbled at many brilliant folks that are out there.
Peter Norvig - Checkout his page, and his books PPIA, AIMA
Sandi Metz - Watch her talks
Rich Hickey - Watch his talks
Raymond Hettinger - Watch his live coding sections
Brian Kernighan - read "The Pratice of Programming"
Richard O'Keefe - read "The Craft of Prolog"
John Carmack - The master of constraints and doing more by doing less
Jan Weilemaker - maintainer of SWI-Prolog, read the code
Linux Linus - His stubborness and meaniness has kept Linux together, if he was too passive, the kernel would have been a mess. Design by committe rarely works, someone gotta own it. He owns it.
OpenBSD Theo - Unix systems are better secure because of Theo's stubbornness, lots of branches end up incorporating changes that started from OpenBSD.
TJ Holowaychuk - I think he writes 10,000 lines of code a day
PHP Nikita Popov - The kid is brilliant
Anthony Minessale of Freeswitch
Moxie Marlinspike - the guy that brought us signal
Kyle Kingsbury aka Aphyr, checkout Jepsen, checkout his clojure tutorial.
I've never heard of Raymond Hettinger before but I'm currently watching one of his videos [1] and it's amazing. Thanks for sharing your list, I'll definitely look up some more of these people.
Well, Linux Torvalds would be an inspiration, definitely. To start from basically nothing and build Linux into what it's become, is no small feat (of course he had help, but that doesn't detract from the accomplishment).
Other inspirations are a lot of the standard "greats" of the field: Rob Pike, Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrupp, Brian Kernighan, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Richard Stevens, Nicholas Wirth, Edsger Dijkstra, Charles Simonyi, etc.
He hasn't revolutionized programming itself or anything but he works on one project indefinitely and lives off donations. Only works on features he finds interesting.
He lives an ideal life for a programmer in my opinion.
A senior dev in a company where I used to work. Helped me break out of architecture astronautism. Always got work done really quickly with simple code, no fancy tricks. 10x developer isn't real but this guy was probably 2 or 3x. Maintained a partial Linux build of our officially Windows only product due to personal ideology. And was really humble and friendly.
I see Daniel Bernstein hasn't been mentioned, but looking through his software, not many can match his track record of (seemingly) bug-free C code. In any case, he's a mathematician and it shows.
Since learning about his patricia tree implementation (or rather, crit-bit tree), i've been using it in a lot of projects, and again, very clean and beautiful implementation of an efficient data structure.
So yes, his work (among that of many others) has been a source of inspiration for me.
Gary Bernhardt. He does a great job at teaching Vim/Bash/Git workflow in his screencasts, which is typically something that's hard to learn on your own. I remember my mind getting blown when he did this in vim `:nmap ,t :w\|:!clear && ruby %<cr>` (if you don't use vim, this remaps comma-t to run the current ruby file you're editing). I still use that little trick all the time and it always amuses my friends.
David Harel[1], the inventor of Statecharts notation.
“If asked about the lessons to be learned from the statecharts story, I would definitely put tool support for executability and experience in real-world use at the top of the list. Too much computer science research on languages, methodologies, and semantics never finds its way into the real world, even in the long term, because these two issues do not get sufficient priority. One of the most interesting aspects of this story is the fact that the work was not done in an academic tower, inventing something and trying to push it down the throats of real-world engineers. It was done by going into the lion’s den, working with the people in industry. This is something I would not hesitate to recommend to young researchers; in order to affect the real world, one must go there and roll up one’s sleeves. One secret is to try to get a handle on the thought processes of the engineers doing the real work and who will ultimately use these ideas and tools. In my case, they were the avionics engineers, and when I do biological modeling, they are biologists. If what you come up with does not jibe with how they think, they will not use it. It’s that simple.”[2]
Greenblatt and Gosper and Stallman back when he was competing with Symbolics. Giants of yesteryear. Whenever I get sick of it all, I read Levy's "Hackers" again and come away inspired.
For me what's impressive is when someone builds a product that becomes so successful it takes on a life of its own. Examples:
(redis) antirez (redis) - Beautiful product, elegant codebase, thriving ecosystem. Amazing work for one person (obviously many more people are involved now, but just getting a product to the point of creating an ecosystem is impressive)
(docker) shykes, jpetazzo and the rest of the docker team
(react) Pete Hunt, one of the original creators of react (I'm sure others were involved, but I met this guy years back in SF, he probably doesn't remember - but he came off as quite smart)
(ffmpeg, qemu) fabrice bellard - Mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the guy is an absolute beast.
(hashicorp) Mitchell Hasimoto - The best example of a 10x programmer I've ever seen, but also great product sense. Every hashicorp product is well built and it's emerging as a nice ecosystem.
(bitcoin) Satoshi - come on. Obviously.
(ethereum) Vitalik Buterin - I was skeptical of ethereum at first but I've been really impressed by Vitalik and the team's dedication - they did a great job launching a product and building an ecosystem around it (<insert criticisms of solidity>)
(Tor) Roger Dingledine and Paul Syverson - Tor. Visionary, world changing product and a strong community.
(javascript) brandon eich - Original creator of JS
(go) Rob Pike - go
(other languages): DHH (rails), Yukihiro Matsumoto (ruby), Guido von Rossum (python), Resmus Lerdorf (PHP, believe it or not)
(the obvious): Linus Torvalds (linux, git), John Carmack (doom, quake, oculus)
(the kings): Zuckerberg, Gates
(the graybeards): kernighan, ritchie, thompson, knuth
Surprisingly, at least for me, i don't see here Robert C. Martin, Kent Beck or Alan Key...
Maybe they are old, and not the bussiness-succesfull-type but they are still Gods for me in the academic side. They can clarify a lot of things most people think they understood, or worst, i tought i understood.
Why? For me? Because the power they have modeling, the experience they accumulated in a lot of areas, how they move checking metrics and not only by what they feel or their instinct. And of course, because of the power of their ideas which made them famous.
You dont have to agree them 100% of the time. Of course not. But when you don't agree, check that twice, and check again after some years of earning knowledge and experience too. They deserve that.
Paul Graham - basically I love reading 100% of what he writes. Everything brings unique insights and it's encouraging to see the hacker mindset in someone so experienced.
Joel Spolsky - also a great writer.
Chris Sawyer - anyone who could write a full game in assembly is really badass
Aaron Patterson. For the 10+ years I've followed his work, he's always been kind, generous, hard-working, an excellent teacher of the craft and, quite simply, a good person. The same goes for Salvatore Sanfilippo.
Jon Bentley, author of Programming Pearls, which is the clearest explanation of solving the actual problem needed; when I say "software engineering", PP is what I mean.
Tim Sweeney of Epic Games has some very interesting ideas on programming and languages. He inspired me to make a career out of it (for better or worse).
I’ve met and worked with a lot of inspiring good programmers in my life, so it would be difficult to provide a list of names.
Eric S. Raymond. Though he - like Stallman - is a bit of a controversial figure, I learnt a lot about software architecture from his "The Art of Unix Programming". And I admire him for the many key FOSS projects he has been an important part of.
My professor of distributed networking. He always pushed for not accepting the status quo and think outside the box. Taught me to look through bullshit and pretense. His use to say TCP is not perfect think of your own protocol
I'm impressed with and have been inspired by the work many programmers have produced, but I don't look up to them. As a matter of principle, I think it is unhealthy behaviour to idolise others.
There is a big difference between looking up to somebody and idolising him/her.
Looking up to somebody means that you admire them for their character and/or achievements. "Honour to whom honour is due." In a further step, they might become a role model - meaning that you take them as a personal example because you want to achieve similar things in life. This is in line with Newton's "If I have seen far, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." Their example inspires and guides you in your own efforts.
Idolising starts when you admire somebody so much that you fail to see them as human. You refuse to admit to their weaknesses and failures. And instead of seeking inspiration from them for living your own life, you attempt to relive theirs. They have become a god to you - hence the term, "idol".
Pierre-Olivier Latour -- he built Quartz Composer & GitUp, two pretty incredible tools. Looking at his portfolio, I'm amazed how much high quality software a single person can build.
Seebs — he writes “programs” for his own brain and then runs them fast enough that he frequently picks up on things that people who are naturally talented in that area would miss.
Peter Norvig - Checkout his page, and his books PPIA, AIMA
Sandi Metz - Watch her talks
Rich Hickey - Watch his talks
Raymond Hettinger - Watch his live coding sections
Brian Kernighan - read "The Pratice of Programming"
Richard O'Keefe - read "The Craft of Prolog"
John Carmack - The master of constraints and doing more by doing less
Jan Weilemaker - maintainer of SWI-Prolog, read the code
Linux Linus - His stubborness and meaniness has kept Linux together, if he was too passive, the kernel would have been a mess. Design by committe rarely works, someone gotta own it. He owns it.
OpenBSD Theo - Unix systems are better secure because of Theo's stubbornness, lots of branches end up incorporating changes that started from OpenBSD.
TJ Holowaychuk - I think he writes 10,000 lines of code a day
PHP Nikita Popov - The kid is brilliant
Anthony Minessale of Freeswitch
Moxie Marlinspike - the guy that brought us signal
Kyle Kingsbury aka Aphyr, checkout Jepsen, checkout his clojure tutorial.
Sergio Moreira, Nagra - famous PSX Hacker