People (heroes) who impressed me the most grouped by programming languages

B

Kenneth (Ken) Thompson is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating system. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-developed the Go programming language.

C

Dennis Ritchie is most well-known for creating the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system and B programming language. Ritchie and Thompson were awarded the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999.

Brian Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist. He worked at Bell Labs and contributed to the development of Unix alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan's name became widely known through co-authorship of the first book on the C programming language (The C Programming Language) with Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan affirmed that he had no part in the design of the C language ("it's entirely Dennis Ritchie's work"). He authored many Unix programs, including ditroff. Kernighan is coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. The "K" of K&R C and of AWK both stand for "Kernighan".

Linus Torvalds is a Finnish software engineer who is the creator and, historically, the lead developer of the Linux kernel, used by Linux distributions and other operating systems such as Android. He also created the distributed version control system Git.

BASIC

Bill Gates is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), president and chief software architect. He was a major entrepreneur of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.

Python

Guido van Rossum is a Dutch programmer best known as the creator of the Python programming language. He remained a member of the Python Steering Council through 2019, and withdrew from nominations for the 2020 election.

Kevin Goldsmith. CTO at Anaconda. Former CTO at Onfido and Avvo, VP of Engineering at Spotify, Director at Adobe, and Lead at Microsoft.

C++

John Carmack. One of my biggest heroes. John Carmack is an American computer programmer and video game developer. He co-founded the video game company id Software and was the lead programmer of its 1990s games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and their sequels.

JavaScript

Alex MacCaw he co-founded Clearbit. I have read his books e.g. JavaScript Web Applications. I did enjoy it. He inspired me to program more in JS back then.

Eric Elliott is a veteran JavaScript application architect. He has contributed to software experiences for Adobe Systems, Zumba Fitness, The Wall Street Journal, ESPN, BBC, and top recording artists including Usher, Frank Ocean, Metallica, and many more.

Go

Steve Francia. He is best known for several projects: The Go Language, MongoDB, Docker, and Drupal.

Java

James Gosling. He is best known as the founder and lead designer behind the Java programming language. I was inspired by his quotes.

Ruby

David Heinemeier Hansson is a Danish programmer, and the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework. He is also a partner at the web-based software development firm 37signals (creators of Basecamp and Hey).