he following is list of researchers of 

programming language theory, design, implementation,

and related areas.

1. John Backus, leader of the team that developed FORTRAN, developer of BNF

2. Friedrich L. Bauer, co-designer of ALGOL
3. Kathleen Booth, designed and developed the first assembly language
4. Gilad Bracha, designer of Newspeak, researcher in the area of reflection[1]
5. Walter Bright, designer of D
6. Alain Colmerauer, creator of Prolog
7. Ole-Johan Dahl, co-inventor of Simula
8. Brendan Eich, designer of JavaScript
9. James Gosling, father of the Java programming language
10. Ralph Griswold, designer of SNOBOL, SL5, and Icon
11. Anders Hejlsberg, original author of Turbo Pascal, chief architect of C#
12. Rich Hickey, designer of Clojure
13. Grace Hopper, co-designer of COBOL
14. Roberto Ierusalimschy, designer of Lua
15. Simon Peyton Jones, lead developer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler and major
contributor to the design of the Haskell programming language
16. Alan Kay, and Dan Ingalls, co-inventors of Smalltalk
17. John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, designed and developed the
first BASIC language
18. Brian Kernighan, co-designer of AWK and AMPL
19. Chris Lattner, designer of Swift
20. Rasmus Lerdorf, father of PHP
21. Xavier Leroy, chief designer of OCaml
22. Yukihiro Matsumoto, designer of Ruby
23. John McCarthy, designer of LISP
24. Kristen Nygaard, co-inventor of Simula
25. Martin Odersky, designer of Scala
26. John Ousterhout, designer of Tcl
27. Rob Pike, co-designer of Limbo and Go
28. Cicely Popplewell, co-designer of software for Manchester Mark 1
29. Dennis Ritchie, designer of C
30. Matthias Felleisen, creator of Racket (programming language)
31. Guido van Rossum, designer of Python
32. Guy L. Steele, Jr., co-designer of Scheme and designer of Fortress
33. Bjarne Stroustrup, designer of C++
34. Gerald Jay Sussman, co-designer of Scheme
35. Don Syme, creator of F#
36. Ken Thompson, designer of B and co-designer of Go
37. Larry Wall, designer of Perl
38. Philip Wadler, co-designer of Haskell
39. Niklaus Wirth, designer of Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon
40. Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Language