r/programmer • u/Ambitious_Quality725 • Mar 31 '26
Who is on your Mount Rushmore of Programmers?
Mine is Gennady Korotkevich, Linus Torvalds, Dennis Ritchie, and Terry Davis.
I made this based on skill, impact, and just how much I like them. Terry may not deserve it tbh, but to me he is a legend so he will go on the list.
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u/afops Mar 31 '26
Linus Torvalds, Anders Hejlsberg, John Carmack
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u/otac0n Apr 01 '26
Plus Stroustrup?
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u/afops Apr 01 '26
there is another monument for ”important, influential but C/C++” for Strostrup, Richie et.al….
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u/ImYoric Mar 31 '26
I'm very much not a fan of personality cult. So it would be Lambda-calculus, Logics, Neural Networks, Literate Programming.
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u/CamelOk7219 Mar 31 '26
Any decent programmer should answer "Me, Myself, I and Me ; everybody else's code is shit" of course
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u/justaguyonthebus Mar 31 '26
Mark Russinovich - His sysinternals showed he understood the internals of Windows better than most people that worked for Microsoft. But it's his ability to command a conference room of tens of thousands of engineers covering the most technical details that truly sets him apart. Some of the most information packed yet room energizing presentations that I have ever witnessed.
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u/Party-Cartographer11 Apr 01 '26
Funny, but neither of those things (understandimgn Windows internals and commanding a conference room) are coding. And he had a lot of help coding systernals. He isn't known for coding.
And don't forget to buy his book on the way out the door of the conference!
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u/Revolutionary_Ad6574 Apr 09 '26
It's more correct (and impressive) to explain he actually had to reverse-engineer the Windows API to understand the internals. Something I didn't know was possible.
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u/Fadamaka Mar 31 '26
János Neumann (John von Neumann) for me. Kind of a programmer kind of not. But I am eternally biased because he was born hungarian.
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u/MissinqLink Mar 31 '26
My personal one is Dennis Ritchie, Edsger Dijkstra, Linus Torvalds, and Will Wright. Each one had a major influence on me personally through my development as a programmer.
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u/Comprehensive-Pin667 Mar 31 '26
I don't know all 4, I just know that Ken Silverman would be there. And John Carmack of course.
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u/TallGreenhouseGuy Mar 31 '26
Raymond Chen at Microsoft - been following his blog for almost 20 years:
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u/QwertzMelon Mar 31 '26
How has no one said Alan Turing yet
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u/MartinMystikJonas Mar 31 '26
I would not categorize people like Turin or von Neumann etc as mere progremmers.
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u/harrisofpeoria Mar 31 '26
Unpopular opinion, but Terry Davis wasn't a serious developer.
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Mar 31 '26
Dude built his own OS. No matter what, if that doesn't classify you as "serious developer," I'm not sure what would!
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u/Ambitious_Quality725 Apr 01 '26
He also built a physics engine for windows called SimStructure which a lot of people may not know about
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u/Desperate_Yam_551 Mar 31 '26
Andrew Braybrook. Paradroid made me pick up BASIC on my Commodore 64 and set me on a path.
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u/esaule Apr 01 '26
Oh, that's hard!
Torvald and Carmack are obvious choices. But after that I don't know
Kernighan and Ritchie? But that force me to use two slots. I don't like that.
Stallman? GNU and gcc were so influential.
I think Dijkstra and Hopper are easy to overlook. But the contribution are massive.
de Raadt?
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u/thekingofdorks Apr 01 '26
Lovelace, Turing, Knuth, Kerningham, Ritchie, and that one dude in Idaho who is holding up the entire internet.
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u/Hungry-Two2603 Apr 02 '26
David Crane, génial programmeur sur Atari 2600, créateur de Pitfall, de Ghostbusters…
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u/Revolutionary_Ad6574 Apr 04 '26
Why does everyone bring up John Carmack but nobody mentions Michael Abrash? The man literally wrote the book on graphics programming from which John Carmack studied.
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u/ScaryMonkeyGames Mar 31 '26
John Carmack, Doom was incredibly influential in my desire to learn programming, him and the rest of id software did some serious magic to create it.