BASIC – John Kemeny &

Thomas Kurtz
John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz designed the
original BASIC programming language in 1964
at Dartmouth University to provide computer
access to non-science students.  Kemeny was a
Hungarian-American mathematician, computer
   scientist, and educator.  He served as President of
Dartmouth College 1970–1981 and chaired the
presidential commission that investigated the
Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979. 
Kurtz is an American computer scientist who
was Professor of Mathematics and Director of
Computer and Information Systems at
Dartmouth.  In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow
of the Association for Computing Machinery.
 

C – Dennis Ritchie
Dennis Ritchie is an American computer scientist
who invented the C programming language in
1972 for Bell Telephone Labs.  Ritchie is co-
author of the definitive book on C, The C
Programming Language (also known as K&R in
reference to the authors Kernighan and Ritchie). 
Ritchie also co-developed the Unix operating
system, received the Turing Award in 1983 and
the National Medal of Technology in 1998. 
   Ritchie was head of Lucent Technologies System
Software Research Department when he retired
in 2007.
 
C++ – Bjarne Stroustrup
Bjarne Stroustrup is a Danish computer scientist
and the Chair Professor of Computer Science at
Texas A&M University.  He invented C++ in
1979 (then called “C with Classes”) and wrote
what many consider to be the the C++ bible, The
C++ Programming Language.

   
 C# – Anders Hejlsberg
Anders Hejlsberg is a prominent Danish software
engineer who currently works for Microsoft as
the lead architect of the C# programming
language.  He also developed the J++
programming language and Windows
Foundation Classes.  Hejlsberg recently became
a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and
Technical Fellow.
   
COBOL – Grace Hopper
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was an American
computer scientist and United States Naval
officer.  A pioneer in the field, she was one of the
first programmers of the Harvard Mark I
calculator, and she developed the first compiler
for a computer programming language.  COBOL
was an extension of Hopper’s FLOW-MATIC
language.  It was Hopper’s idea that programs
could be written in a language that was close to
   English rather than in machine code.
 
Delphi – Anders Hejlsberg
Anders Hejlsberg is a prominent Danish software
engineer who wrote a Pascal compiler for CP/M
and MS-DOS that eventually became Borland
Turbo Pascal, the most commercially successful
Pascal compiler ever.  In 1989, Hejlsberg joined
Borland as chief architect for the replacement of
Turbo Pascal, Delphi.

 
FORTRAN – John Backus
John Backus was an American computer scientist
who led the team that invented FORTRAN, the
first widely used high-level programming
language.  He also invented the Backus-Naur
form (BNF), the notation used to define formal
language syntax.  Backus received W.W.
McDowell Award in 1967, National Medal of
Science Award in 1975, and the ACM Turing
Award in 1977.
 
  
 Java – James Gosling
James Gosling is a famous Canadian software
developer who has been with Sun Microsystems
since 1984 and is considered the father of the
Java programming language, invented in 1991. 
Gosling did the original design of Java and
implemented its original compiler and virtual
machine.
 
  
JavaScript – Brendan Eich
Brendan Eich is a computer programmer who
created the JavaScript programming language for
the Netscape Navigator web browser in 1995. 
He is now the Chief Technology Officer of the
Mozilla Corporation.

  
Perl – Larry Wall
Larry Wall is a programmer and author, best
known for his creation of the Perl programming
language in 1987.  A linguist working as a
systems administrator for NASA, Wall
developed Perl as a general purpose Unix
scripting language to make report processing
easier.  Wall is also the co-author of
Programming Perl (often referred to as the Camel
Book), the definitive resource for Perl
programmers.
    
PHP – Rasmus Lerdorf
Rasmus Lerdorf is a Danish-Greenlandic
programmer and most notable as the creator of
the PHP programming language.  PHP began in
1994 as a set of Common Gateway Interface
binaries that Lerdorf wrote in C to replace Perl
scripts he had been using on his personal
homepage.  Lerdorf has been an Infrastructure
Architecture Engineer at Yahoo! since 2002.
 

   
 Python – Guido van Rossum
Guido van Rossum is a Dutch programmer best
known as the author of the Python programming
language.  Python started as a hobby project: a
scripting language descendant of ABC that
would appeal to Unix/C hackers.  In the Python
community, Van Rossum is known as a
“Benevolent Dictator for Life.”  Van Rossum
currently works at Google on Python
development.
 
  
Ruby – Yukihiro Matsumoto
Yukihiro Matsumoto is a Japanese computer
scientist and programmer best known as the chief
designer of the Ruby programming language in
the mid-1990s and its reference implementation,
Matz’s Ruby Interpreter (MRI).  Today,
Matsumoto is the head of R&D at the Network
Applied Communication Laboratory, an open
source systems integrator company.
 

   
Visual Basic – Alan Cooper
Alan Cooper is widely regarded as the father of
Visual Basic.  In 1987, Cooper developed
”Tripod,” an improved shell/desktop for the
fledgling Windows operating system.  Tripod
became Microsoft’s “Ruby,” and Cooper led a
team of engineers to deliver what ultimately
became Visual Basic.  (more)  Today Cooper is
an advocate of UI design, runs a design company
and writes books about how to make software
user interfaces more usable.