Glad to see John von Neumann and John Backus recommended.
I would add Lady Ada Lovelace, Nicholas Negroponti, and William Gibson(!) (first explorer of cyberspace).

Overall, a very reasonable list. Lots of luminaries there. Then I saw "Kent Beck, creator of JUnit and pioneer of XTreme Programming" Ergh! Sorry, I just vomited a little bit, in my mouth... Give me a break! JUnit took what? An afternoon to come up with? There is no genius in JUnit, unless you count the hype machine that culimated in Kent Beck's name appearing on this list.

Are you kidding me, where is Steve Wozniak???

I think Ward Cunningham, the creator of the "Wiki" deserves to be added to the list. If not the top 40, then surely the next 60.

Considering Perl is as popular (if not more) as Python,
Larry Wall should also have been mentioned.

You have to include David L. Parnas!!!

Shouldn't Al Gore get a token place in the list?

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

;-)

In any reasonably sized list, there will always be some people who are overlooked. Don't go around bashing the makers for having some unfair criteria or for missing your hero. On the other hand, go ahead and post people who have been overlooked, but don't get pissed about it.

We can confirm that Kristen is a male name (Norwegian) not female! Good news: Doug Engelbart is on the expanded list, as you'll when the second round voting opens shortly - we received another passionate nomination too, as follows:

"Nothing said about this incredible engineer will describe in full justice the incredible ideas he put forward. He set the tone for modern computing, and his ideas have only recently been brought to the masses: email, teleconferencing, collaborative computing, hypertext, the graphical interface idea, the mouse, a one-handed keyboard, online help systems and much much more!
<>
His ideas were materialized as the NLS, an integrated idea processing system, which met an unfortunate end. His vision, however, was an inspiration for engineers at XEROX PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), which created some impressive systems such at the ALTO, and the STAR. The work at PARC was in turn an inspiration for Apple which is, today, the leading innovator in computing technology."

OK, Kristen Nygaard is definitely male (or, rather, was. Both he and Ole Johan Dahl have passed away in the last couple of years)

One more (male, unfortunately) omission: Doug Engelbart (who should also end up in the top 5)

Bertrand Meyer not on the list? (Eiffel and Design By Contract)

If this is supposed to cover the whole history of software (including deceased pioneers), then how the heck can the list not **start** with the name of John von Neumann???? And if you included Charles Babbage (the first hardware guy), shouldn't you certainly include his assistant Countess Ada Lovelace (the first software person)? And I must say I'm quite surprised to see no mention at all of Douglas Englebart, even if he is known more popularly for hardware (by inventing the mouse) than for his software inventions (windows, hypertext) on user interfaces, which it was meant to enable.

Chris Date

I may be a bit late, but I decided to try anyway, as I feel you have left out a good chunk of a very important software revolution which has happened in the past 10 years and is still happening as we speak.

I am talking about VoIP.

How about: Marvin Minsky, John von Neumann, C.A.R. Hoare?

>>>Donald Knuth: "Father of Computer Science" - author of The Art of Computer Programming; inventor of TeX, allowing typesetting of text and mathematical formulas on a PC<<<

Great to see Don Knuth now in his warranted place among this top 100...and doubtless among the top 5 by the time we're through...

I am surprised that no one has realized that even on this extended list there are only two women - out of over 100.

Adele Goldberg - who helped Ala Kay with developing SmallTalk - and Grace Murray Hopper.

DistaffSide, think you've missed Kristen Nygaard, who developed the first object-oriented programming language, SIMULA, with Ole-Johan Dahl, They're both here on this new list. Female hackers unite!

How is one to compare the relative merits - in terms of being "top software people" - of, say, James Gosling versus Bill Gates? Or Bill Gates versus Vincent Cerf? this is going to be a very very difficult exercise. Only the very brave would dare bet on the final outcome, if the aim is still to cull the overall expanded list down to 20. 80% of these folks seem to be indisputably "top" people to me. There will be bloodshed once the new voting gets of the ground!

I am surprised that no one has realized that even on this extended list there are only two women - out of over 100.

Adele Goldberg - who helped Ala Kay with developing SmallTalk - and Grace Murray Hopper.

Just running one's eye down the new, expanded list is enough to reassure us that technology hasn't reached a plateau as some would argue but that it remains in high gear: there seems to be no let-up in innovation and brilliance, whether we look at the early mathematician-pioneers or the later bytecode masters. This is human innovation at its best. We should salute these 100 or so incredibly gifted individuals as an affirmation of what's possible...and of some things that (as yet) aren't. Magnificent!

I share the previous poster's pleasure at seeing this list expanded. I am not certain how true it is, though, to say that Ted Codd "invented" SQL, at least not in a syntactical sense.

Some consider SQL an imperfect relational language anyhow.

What a delight to see Alonzo Church - his work is of major importance in mathematical logic, recursion theory and in theoretical computer science. Lambda Calculus, which he created in the 1930s, remains an invaluable tool for computer scientists today.

Why not leave it at 40, just remove the dead wood (Myhrvold? Winblad? wtf??) and actually put some serious effort into a) defining the criteria and b) sorting the candidates.

Joshua Bloch made the list but Doug Lea didn't? Odd. (Not to knock Bloch, his work has been good and valuable.) Anyway, perhaps I'm biased, but I hope Monty makes the final cut. :-)