The oldest programmer in the world. Who is the best programmer in the world? The most famous programmers in the world
Attention! The opinions of the people answering the question may not coincide with the opinions of the editors.
Who do you consider to be the best programmer of all time?
MITCH RHYS-JONES
programmer
“DONALD WHIP.
He is known for his monograph “The Art of Programming,” which consists of several volumes. It contains detailed descriptions of everything from data structures and random numbers and ending with sorting, enumeration, and analysis of algorithms - a direction for which he laid the foundations. In all his books, he gave examples written in assembly language - machine instructions. Here's what Bill Gates said about this monograph: “If you think you're a good programmer, read Knuth's The Art of Programming. If you can read it all, be sure to send me a resume.”
Knuth began working on the monograph in 1962 and has completed four volumes to date. The fifth volume will appear in 2020, which means it will take him 58 years to complete the five volumes. But he is going to write two more. And this is not to mention the fact that he created TeX, one of the most widespread computer layout systems, the METAFONT language for developing vector fonts, as well as the WEB and CWEB competent programming systems. He has been awarded the John von Neumann Medal, the Franklin Medal, the Turing Award and the US National Medal of Science. For his work on The Art of Programming, he was even given the title of Professor Emeritus of the Art of Programming."
programmer
"Anders Hejlsberg.
He wrote the Pascal compiler in assembly language for the two dominant operating systems of the time, DOS and CPM. The compiler later entered the integrated development environment Turbo Pascal. Thanks to it, compiling, linking and running a program began to take seconds instead of minutes.
Heilsberg's compiler was bought by Borland International, which also hired the programmer. Borland sold the compiler along with a full development environment for much less money than its competitors. Thanks to Heilsberg, the productivity of programmers has increased significantly. Then I was so impressed by his work that I even wrote a book Using Turbo Pascal, first published in 1986. It can still be found on Amazon and eBay.
Anders Hejlsberg led the team that created Borland Delphi (Object Pascal), which was as fast as Turbo Pascal. Delphi currently ranks 11th in the TIOBE ranking of programming languages and development environments. Hejlsberg later went to work for Microsoft, where he led the development of C#, which is now ranked 5th in the TIOBE rankings.”
RAVI KUMAR
student
"Linus Torvalds.
Creator of Linux. Everyone knows that he can program better than Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. In such a high-pressure, paranoid, money-making industry, no one could have foreseen the release of Linux, a free and open operating system that was the result of the collaboration of many programmers. He also created the Git file version control system and the professional diving program Subsurface.
James Gosling.
Creator of the Java language, which is used all over the world. Based on the PostScript page description language interpreter, he developed Network system Extensible Windowing System (NEWS), which distributes computing across a network. What he didn’t work on: both ground-based analysis of telemetry from the ISIS 2 satellite and the first version text editor Emacs for Unix, and much more.
Richard Stallman.
Founder of the Free Software Foundation and founder of the open source movement, one of the most important figures in the history of information technology. He worked on the GPL, the world's most widely used license, including Linux, as well as the GCC compiler suite, the Emacs text editor, and other open source software."
Wilhelm Schickard
(1592 - 1635)
Computer history begins in 1623, when Wilhelm Schickard built humanity's first automatic calculator.The Schickard gaming machine can perform basic arithmetic operations on integer inputs. His letters to Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, explain the use of his “calculation of clocks” for the calculation of astronomical tables.
The non-programmable Schickard machine was based on the traditional decimal number system. Leibniz subsequently discovered the more convenient binary system (1679), an important element of the world's first computer-controlled work program, due to Zuse (1941).
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
(1646-1716)
Leibniz, sometimes called the last universal genius, invented at least two things that are important to the modern world: calculus and bit-based binary arithmetic.
Modern physics, mathematics, engineering would be unthinkable without the former: a fundamental method of working with infinitesimal numbers. Leibniz was the first to publish it. He developed it around 1673. In 1679, he perfected the notation for integration and differentiation that is still used today.
Binary arithmetic based on the dual system was invented around 1679, and published in 1701. This became the basis for almost all modern computers.
Charles Babbage
British mathematician and inventor, author of works on the theory of functions, mechanization of calculations in economics; foreign corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1832). In 1833developed a project for a universal digital computer- the prototype of a computer. Babbage envisioned the ability to enter instructions into the machine using punched cards. However, this machine was not finished, since the low level of technology at that time became the main obstacle to its creation. Charles Babbage is often called the "father of the computer" for his invention of the Analytical Engine, although its prototype was created many years after his death.Lovelace Augusta Ada
A.Lovelace developed the first programs for the Bubbage Analytical Engine, thereby laying the theoretical foundations of programming. She first introduced the concept of the operation cycle. In one of the notes, she expressed the main idea that the analytical engine can solve problems that, due to the difficulty of calculations, are almost impossible to solve manually. Thus, for the first time, a machine was considered not only as a mechanism that replaces a person, but also as a device capable of performing work beyond human capabilities. Although the Bubbage Analytical Engine was not built and Lovelace's programs were never debugged and did not work, a number of her statements general provisions retained their fundamental importance for modern programming. Nowadays, A. Lovelace is rightfully called the first programmer in the world.
(1912-1954) Alan Mathieson Turing reformulated Kurt Goedel's unprovability results in terms of Turing machines (TMS). Closely related to earlier work was done by Turing's advisor Alonso Church. TMs subsequently became the most widely used abstract computing models. Universal TMs can emulate any other TM, or any other known computer.
During World War II, Turing helped (with Welchman) break the Nazi code. Some sources say that this work was decisive for the victory over the Third Reich.
Turing later proposed his famous test for assessing whether a computer is intelligent (more on History artificial intelligence). Computer science's most sought-after award bears his name: the Turing Award.
Kurt Gödel
(1906-1978)
In 1931, just a few years after Julius Lilienfeld patented the transistor, Kurt Gödel (or "Goedel" rather than "Godel") laid outfundamentals of theoretical computer sciencewith his work on universal formal languages and limits on proof and computation. It constructs formal systems that allow self-referential statements that speak about themselves, in particular about whether they can be obtained from an enumerable given set of axioms using a computational theorem-proving procedure. Gödel went further to construct accounts that claim their own unprovability to demonstrate that traditional mathematics is either flawed in a certain algorithmic sense or contains unprovable but true statements.
Gödel's incompleteness result is widely regarded as the most remarkable achievement of 20th century mathematics, although some mathematicians say it is logic rather than mathematics, and others call it a fundamental result of theoretical computer science (reformulated by Church & Post & Turing around 1936), a discipline that did not yet officially exist back then, but was actually created through Gödel's work. He had enormous influence not only in computer science, but also in philosophy and other fields.
John von Neumann(12/28/1903, Budapest, - 2/8/1957, Washington)
American mathematician, member of the US National Academy of Sciences (1937). In 1926 he graduated from the University of Budapest. From 1927 he taught at the University of Berlin, from 1930-33 - at Princeton University (USA), from 1933 professor at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Since 1940, he has been a consultant to various army and naval institutions (N. took part, in particular, in the work on creating the first atomic bomb). Since 1954 member of the Atomic Energy Commission.
The main scientific works are devoted to functional analysis and its applications to issues of classical and quantum mechanics. N. also carried out research on mathematical logic and the theory of topological groups. In the last years of his life he was mainly involved in developing issues related to game theory, automata theory; made a great contribution to the creation of the first computers and the development of methods for their use. He is best known as the person whose name is associated with the architecture of most modern computers (the so-called von Neumann architecture)
(22 June 1910, Berlin - 18 December 1995, Hünfeld)
German engineer, computer pioneer. Best known as creator of the first truly working programmable computer(1941) and first programming language high level (1945).
He was involved in the creation of a programmable calculating machine.
1935-1938 : Konrad Zuse builds the Z1, the world's first software-controlled computer. Despite a number of problems in mechanical engineering, all the main components of modern machine tools were present, using binary system dead reckoning is the standard separation of storage and control today. Zuse's 1936 patent application (Z23139/GMD Nr. 005/021) also evidenced the von Neumann architecture (reinvented in 1945) with programs and data modified during storage.
1941 : Zuse completes the Z3, the world's first fully functional programmable from a computer.
1945 : Zuse describes Plankalkuel, the world's first high-level programming language containing many standard functions modern languages programming. FORTRAN came almost ten years later. Zuse also used Plankalkuel to design the world's first chess program.
1946 : Zuse founds the world's first computer startup company: Zuse-Ingenieurbüro Hopferau. Venture capital raised through ETH Zürich and IBM-option on Zuse patents.
In addition to computers general purpose, Zuse built several specialized computers. Thus, calculators S1 and S2 were used to determine the exact dimensions of parts in aircraft technology. The S2 machine, in addition to the computer, also included measuring devices for performing aircraft measurements. The L1 computer, which remained in experimental form, was intended by Zuse to solve logical problems.
1967 : Zuse KG supplied 251 computers, worth about 100 million Deutschmarks.
Kemeny John (Janos)
Mathematician, professor at Dartmouth College (USA). With Thomas Kurtz developed the BASIC programming language and a network system for using several computers simultaneously (“time sharing”). He emigrated to the United States from Hungary in 1940 with his parents. He graduated from Princeton University, where he studied mathematics and philosophy. In 1949 he defended his dissertation, and in 1953 he was invited to Dartmouth. Being the dean of the Mathematics Department at Dartmouth College from 1955 to 1967 and even while serving as president of the college (1970-1981), he did not give up teaching. He was one of the pioneers of teaching the basics of programming: he believed that this subject should be available to all students, regardless of their specialization.
(May 11, 1930 - August 6, 2002)
An outstanding specialist in the field of theoretical programming, author of a number of books, including the classic monograph “The Discipline of Programming.” All of his scientific activity was devoted to the development of methods for creating “correct” programs, the correctness of which can be proven by formal methods. Being one of the authors structured programming concepts, Dijkstra preached against using the GOTO statement. In 1972, his scientific achievements were awarded the Turing Award. When presenting the prize, one of the speakers described Dijkstra's work as follows: "He is an example of a scientist who programs without touching a computer, and does everything possible to ensure that his students do the same and present computer science as a branch of mathematics."
Ershov Andrey Petrovich
(April 19, 1931 – December 8, 1988)
American inventor Douglas Engelbart from the Stanford Research Institute presented world's first computer mouse in 1968 on December 9.
Douglas Engelbart's invention was a wooden cube on wheels with one button. By your own name computer mouse owes to the wire - it reminded the inventor of the tail of a real mouse.
Later, Xerox became interested in Engelbart's idea. Its researchers changed the design of the mouse, and it became similar to the modern one. In the early 1970s, Xerox first introduced the mouse as part of the personal computer. It had three buttons, a ball and rollers instead of disks, and cost $400!
Today there are two types of computer mice: mechanical and optical. The latter are devoid of mechanical elements, and optical sensors are used to track the movement of the manipulator relative to the surface. Latest news technology has become wireless mice.
Niklaus Wirth
(February 15, 1934) Swiss engineer and researcher in the world of programming. Author and one of the developers Pascal programming language. N. Wirth was one of the first to introduce into practice the principle of step-by-step refinement as key to the systematic creation of programs. In addition to Pascal, he created other algorithmic languages (including Modula-2 and Oberon). They are not well known to "production" programmers, but are widely used for theoretical research in the field of programming. Wirth is one of the world's most respected computer scientists; his book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs is considered one of the classic textbooks on structured programming.
Bill Gates
(28 October 1955)American entrepreneur and developer in the field of electronic computer technology, founder of the world's leading software company Microsoft.
In 1980 Microsoft developed the operating system MS-DOS system, which by the mid-1980s became the main operating system in the American microcomputer market. Gates then began developing application programs - electronic Excel tables and the Word text editor, and by the late 1980s, Microsoft had become a leader in this area as well.
In 1986, by releasing the company's shares to the public market, Gates became a billionaire at the age of 31. In 1990 the company introduced Windows shell 3.0, in which verbal commands were replaced with icons selected using the mouse, which made using the computer much easier. By the end of the 1990s, about 90% of all personal computers in the world were equipped with Microsoft software. In 1997, Gates topped the list of the richest people in the world.
Paul Allen
American entrepreneur, co-founder of Microsoft Corporation, which he founded with his school friend Bill Gates in 1975.
In 1975, Allen and Gates used the name "Micro-Soft" for the first time. In the source code of the BASIC language interpreter, created by them at the request of MITS.
In the joint business, Paul Allen was engaged technical ideas and promising developments, Gates found himself closer to negotiations, contracts and other business communications. And yet, the friends resolved the main issues together - sometimes, as Gates later admitted, the arguments continued for 6-8 hours in a row. For the joint brainchild of Allen and Gates, the finest hour came in 1980. It was then that IBM turned to a not very large and not yet very well-known Microsoft with a proposal to adapt several programming languages for their use on a personal IBM computer PC, which was supposed to hit the market in 1981. During the negotiations, it turned out that IBM representatives would not mind finding a contractor who would contract to develop an operating system for the new computer. The partners took on this work. However, Allen and Gates did not develop a new operating system. They knew that Tim Paterson, who worked at Seattle Compute Products, had already developed Q-DOS (Quick Disk Operating System) for 16-bit Intel processors. The trick was that during negotiations for the acquisition of Q-DOS, it was under no circumstances to make it clear to the sellers that Allen and Gates already had a buyer for this system. Gates, as the main negotiator, had to work hard on this, but the combination worked brilliantly. True, the system had to be redesigned, because it had to work on 8-bit processors. In an effort to meet the deadline, they worked almost around the clock and, according to Allen himself, there was a day when he and Bill, without stopping, sat at the computer for 36 hours straight. For PC-DOS, the acquisition of which cost several tens of thousands of dollars, IBM immediately paid 6 thousand dollars, and, according to the terms of the agreement signed by the parties, IBM undertook to sell computers only with PC-DOS, while paying interest to Microsoft from each unit of equipment sold.
(October 4, 1965)
Until 1991 he worked at the multidisciplinary research institute of the USSR Ministry of Defense. Began studying the phenomenon computer viruses in October 1989, when the Cascade virus was discovered on his computer. From 1991 to 1997 he worked at the Scientific and Technical Center "KAMI", where, together with a group of like-minded people, he developed anti-virus project "AVP" (now - "Kaspersky Anti-Virus""). In 1997, Evgeny Kaspersky became one of the founders Kaspersky Lab.
Today, Evgeny Kaspersky is one of the world's leading experts in the field of virus protection. He is the author of a large number of articles and reviews on the problem of computer virology, and regularly speaks at specialized seminars and conferences in Russia and abroad. Evgeny Valentinovich Kaspersky is a member of the Computer Virus Research Organization (CARO), which brings together experts in this field.
Among the most significant and interesting achievements of Evgeniy Valentinovich and the “Laboratory” he heads in 2001 is the opening of the annual Virus Bulletin conference - the central event in the antivirus industry, as well as the successful counteraction to all global viral epidemics that occurred in 2001.
Evgeniy Roshal
(March 10, 1972, Chelyabinsk)
Evgeniy Roshal graduated from the Instrument Engineering Faculty of the Chelyabinsk Polytechnic Institute with a degree in Computers, Complexes, Systems and Networks.
In the fall of 1993, he released the first public version of the RAR 1.3 archiver, and in the fall of 1996, FAR Manager. Later, with the growing popularity of Microsoft Windows, it released an archiver for Windows, WinRAR. The name RAR stands for Roshal ARchiver.
Sergey Brin
Sergei Mikhailovich Brin was born in Moscow into a Jewish family of mathematicians who moved to the United States permanently in 1979, when he was 6 years old.
In 1993, he entered Stanford University in California, where he received a master's degree and began working on his dissertation. Already during his studies, he became interested in Internet technologies and search engines, became the author of several studies on the topic of extracting information from large arrays of text and scientific data, and wrote a program for processing scientific texts.
In 1995, at Stanford University, Sergei Brin met another mathematics graduate student, Larry Page, with whom they founded Google in 1998. Initially, they argued fiercely when discussing any scientific topic, but then they became friends and teamed up to create search engine for your campus. Together they wrote scientific work“The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” which is believed to contain the prototype of their future super-successful idea.
Brin and Page proved the validity of their idea on the university search engine google.stanford.edu, developing its mechanism in accordance with new principles. On September 14, 1997, the domain google.com was registered. Attempts followed to develop the idea and turn it into a business. Over time, the project left the university and managed to collect investments for further development.
The joint business grew, made profits, and even demonstrated enviable stability during the dot-com crash, when hundreds of other companies went bankrupt. In 2004, the founders were named in Forbes magazine's list of billionaires.
Andrew Tanenbaum
(March 16, 1944)
Professor at the Free University of Amsterdam, where he heads the development team computer systems; received his doctorate in physics from the University of California at Berkeley. Known as the author of Minix (a free Unix-like operating system for student laboratories), books on computer science and RFID virus. He is also the main developer of the Amsterdam Compiler Kit. He considers his teaching activity to be the most important. Andrew Tanenbaum was born in New York City and raised in White Plains, New York. He received a bachelor's degree in physics from MIT in 1965 and a doctorate in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971.
Later he moved with his family to the Netherlands, while maintaining his US citizenship. Andrew Tanenbaum teaches courses on computer organization and operating systems and also received a Ph. D. In 2009, received a grant of 2.5 million euros from the European Research Council for the development of MINIX.
Linus Torvalds
(December 28, 1969)
Creator of a world-famous operating system. In early 1991, he began writing his own platform, aimed at the average consumer, which could be distributed free of charge via the Internet. The new system has found Linux name, derived from combining the name of its creator with the name UNIX. For ten years Linux has become a real competitor to products manufactured by Microsoft, capable of displacing the monopoly of this company in the system and server software market.
Thousands of “interested programmers,” hackers, and computer network specialists happily took up Linus’s idea and began to write, complete, and debug what Torvalds proposed to them. In almost ten years, Linux has gone from being a toy for several hundred fans and enthusiasts, executing a couple of dozen commands in a primitive console, to a professional multi-user and multitasking 32-bit operating system with a windowed graphical interface, which is many times superior to Microsoft Windows in terms of its range of capabilities, stability and power. 95, 98 and NT and can run on almost any modern IBM-compatible computer.
Today, Linux is a powerful UNIX-like platform that includes almost all functions and a whole range of its own properties not found anywhere else. Thanks to high performance and reliability, it has become one of the most popular platforms for organizing http servers.
Bjarne Stroustrup, Bjarne Stroustrup
(June 11, 1950 (according to other sources, December 30), Aarhus, Denmark)
Author of the C++ programming language.
He graduated from Aarhus University (Denmark, 1975) in mathematics and computer science, and defended his Ph. D. thesis in computer science at Cambridge (1979).
Until 2002, he headed the research department in the field of large-scale programming at AT&T (Computer Science Research Center of Bell Telephone Laboratories). Now a professor at Texas A&M University.
Björn was born and raised in Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark. He entered a state university to study computer science. After graduating, he received a master's degree.
Björn Stroustrup received his PhD while working on distributed system design at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge (England).
If you don't go beyond the boundaries of "object-oriented" methods,to stay within the bounds of "good programming"and design”, then the end result is sure to be something thatis basically meaningless.Stroustrup Björn
Martin Fowler
Born in England, lived in London before moving to America in 1994. Currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
One of the books "Refactoring. Improving Existing Code": Martin Fowler and his co-authors shed light on the refactoring process, describing the principles and best tricks its implementation, as well as indicating where and when to begin an in-depth study of the code in order to improve it.
The basis of the book is detailed list Over 70 refactoring techniques, each with motivation and techniques for field-tested code transformation with examples in Java.
The methods discussed in the book allow you to modify the code step by step, making small changes each time, thereby reducing the risk associated with the development of the project.
Any fool can write a program that he can understandcompiler. Good programmers write programsthat other programmers can understand.
Fowler Martin
Sid Meier
(February 24, 1954, Detroit) 
American developer computer games. Graduate of Michigan State University. In 2002, his name was inscribed in the Computer Museum of America's Hall of Fame.
In 1991, MicroProse began selling a game encyclopedia of historically recognizable Civilization images. In 1993, a large vertically integrated company, Spectrum HoloByte, Inc. is making efforts to take over MicroProse.
After the legal proceedings were completed by 1994, Meyer and the company's new CEO, Louis Gilman Louie, had some differences regarding where, how and why to develop their joint gaming business.
"The game is a sequenceinteresting elections"
Donald Erwin Knuth
(January 10, 1938) 
American scientist, honorary professor at Stanford University and several other universities in different countries, foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, teacher and ideologist of programming, author of 19 monographs (including a number of classic books on programming) and more than 160 articles, developer of several well-known software technologies.
The author of a world-famous series of books devoted to basic algorithms and methods of computational mathematics, as well as the creator of desktop publishing systems TEX and METAFONT, designed for typing and layout of books on technical topics (primarily physics and mathematics).
The work of Andrei Petrovich Ershov, later his friend, had a greater influence on young Donald Knuth.
Professor Knuth has received numerous prizes and awards in the field of programming and computational mathematics, including the Turing Award (1974), the US National Medal of Science (1979) and the AMS Steele Prize for a series of popular science articles, the Harvey Prize (1995), the Kyoto Prize ( 1996) for achievements in the field of advanced technology, the Grace Murray Hopper Award (1971).
At the end of February 2009, Knuth was ranked 20th on the list of most cited authors in the CiteSeer project.
The best way to fully understand something isJapanese free software developer and programming language creator Ruby
Online In Japan Inc., he said that he taught himself to program even before leaving school. HeGraduated from the University of Tsukuba, where he researched programming languages and compilers.
Since 2006, he has headed the research and development department of Network Applied Communication Laboratory, a Japanese system integrator of free software.
Born in 1965 in Osaka Prefecture, but at the age of four he moved to Yonago City, Tottori Prefecture, so he is often introduced as a native of Yonago. Currently lives in Matsue City, Shimane Prefecture.
Yukihiro is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and is involved in missionary work. He is married and has four children.I want the computer to be my servantand not the master, so I must be able toquickly and efficiently explain to him what to do.
Matsumoto YukihiroSteve Jobs
(February 24, 1955, San Francisco, California - October 5, 2011, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, California)
American entrepreneur, widely recognized as a pioneer of the IT era. One of the founders, chairman of the board of directors and CEO of Apple Corporation . One of the founders and CEO of the Pixar film studio.
In the late 1970s, Steve and his friend Steve Wozniak developed one of the first personal computers, which had great commercial potential. Computer Apple II became the first mass product of Apple, created on the initiative of Steve Jobs. Jobs later saw the commercial potential of a mouse-driven graphical interface, leading to the Apple Lisa computers and, a year later, Macintosh (Mac).
After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT - a company that developed a computer platform for universities and businesses. In 1986, he acquired the division computer graphics film company Lucasfilm, turning it into Pixar studio. He remained Pixar's CEO and major shareholder until the studio was acquired by The Walt Disney Company in 2006, making Jobs the largest private shareholder and member of Disney's board of directors.
Difficulties developing a new operating system for the Mac led to the purchase of NeXT by Apple in 1996, to use the NeXTSTEP OS as the basis for Mac OS X. As part of the deal, Jobs was given the position of advisor to Apple. The deal was planned by Jobs. By 1997, Jobs regained control of Apple, leading the corporation. Under his leadership, the company was saved from bankruptcy and began to make a profit within a year. Over the next decade, Jobs led the developmentiMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone and iPad, as well as the developmentApple Store, iTunes Store, App Store and iBookstore. The success of these products and services, which provided several years of stable financial profits, allowed Apple to become the most valuable publicly traded company in the world in 2011. Many commentators call Apple's resurgence one of the greatest accomplishments in business history. At the same time, Jobs was criticized for his authoritarian management style, aggressive actions towards competitors, and the desire for total control over products even after they were sold to the buyer.Jobs has received public recognition and a number of awards for his impact on the technology and music industries. He is often called a "visionary" and even the "father of the digital revolution." Jobs was a brilliant speaker and took innovative product presentations to the next level, turning them into exciting shows. His easily recognizable figure in a black turtleneck, faded jeans and sneakers is surrounded by a kind of cult.
Seeing your name in the Forbes ranking is the dream of any successful person. Only now everyone chooses their own path to this goal. Some people start investing, some find themselves selling precious metals, and some even create products that half of the planet’s population cannot imagine their lives without. There are many options. But now I propose to touch on one of the most promising areas, namely, to talk about the 10 richest people who made their fortune with the help of information technology.
10th place. Michael Dell
Net worth: $19 billion.
Life is a cruel thing, so not all our dreams are destined to come true. At the age of 17, the then unknown Michael Dell wanted to become a doctor, but after just two years he had to quit his studies. Do you think everyone gave up on the guy from Texas at this point? Maybe. But already in 2005, his name was on the fourth line of the ranking of the richest people in the United States according to Forbes. The reason for this success can be safely attributed to the company PC Limited, which Michael founded in 1984 immediately after leaving university. Initially, the company sold only computers, but after 19 years (in 2003), the list of manufactured goods increased significantly, so it was decided to rename the business Dell Inc. At that time, the company's net income was already $3 billion a year. Now Michael Dell serves as chairman of the board of directors, acts as chief executive officer, enjoys the success of his four children and donates money to charity.
9th place. Laurene Powell Jobs
Net worth: $19.5 billion.
There is an opinion that a man must find the right goal in life, and a woman must find a man with the right goal. Lauren met such a man at the age of 26, it was Steve Jobs. Powell really owes her ninth place on this list to her husband, because she inherited shares of Disney and Apple. But no one would dare say that “wealth” fell on this woman’s head just like that. We all know that behind every successful man there is always a loving woman. And looking at the achievements of Steve Jobs, you understand that Lauren managed to support home comfort and inspire your husband to conquer new heights. And Powell also has plenty of reasons to be proud of her own. Lauren is on the board of directors of seven charities (she founded two of them herself), her the main objective– help children from poor families get an education. In 2010, Barack Obama personally included Laurene Powell Jobs in a special committee at the White House, which is designed to solve the most pressing public problems.
8th place. Steve Ballmer
Net worth: $21.5 billion.
Steve Ballmer, who served as Microsoft CEO for 14 years (from 2000 to 2014), can easily be considered the most controversial person in our top ten. During his time at the helm of Microsoft, he managed to increase the corporation's annual revenue from $25 billion to $70 billion, but neglect of emerging markets contributed to the fact that in 2012 Steve was recognized as “the worst CEO of a public American company.” But this did not prevent him from entering the list of the richest people on the planet who are not owners of large businesses or their relatives. Ballmer managed to amass his enormous fortune thanks to options received from Microsoft. Well, in order not to fall into depression after leaving the company to which he dedicated best years his life, Bulmer decided to “fill in” the grief very in an unusual way– buy the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team for $2 billion.
7th place. Jack Ma
Net worth: $22.7 billion.
At some point, you may be struck by the idea that the world of IT rich consists only of residents of America. But this is far from true. The Celestial Empire also has its own geniuses. It’s unlikely that Jack Ma and his partners could have imagined that the Alibaba B2B platform they created in 1999 for $60,000 would in a few years turn into a company with a capitalization of $270 billion and generate 2% of China’s GDP. But before Ma Yun's dreams (this is our hero's middle name) turned into reality, he had to go through a difficult childhood, five years of work at the Hangzhou Normal Institute for $12 a month and hundreds of refusals when trying to get any work (his They didn’t even accept it at KFC). The first signs of changes in life appeared when in 1995, while visiting Seattle, Jack Ma first became acquainted with the Internet. The World Wide Web influenced his views so much that just a few months later, the future billionaire created a small website development company. A little later, having returned home and having worked for a year as the head of the Chinese Electronic Commerce Center, he founded “that fabulous company”, which greatly frayed the nerves of eBay management (the Americans had to close their representative office in China altogether due to lost competition). In 2013, Ma Yun resigned as president of the company, but remained on the board of directors. And just ten months after that, Alibaba went public, raising a record amount of investment - $25 billion. The Asian corporation has very global plans for the near future (for example, creating the first private bank in China), and believe me, Jack Ma and his colleagues will do everything possible to achieve their goal.
6th place. Sergey Brin
Net worth: $29.2 billion.
The sixth place on our list went to an American, but this time with Russian roots. The family of Sergey Brin, the same co-founder of Google, emigrated to the States from Moscow when the boy was five years old. A few months before he came of age, Sergei returned to his homeland with a group of students, but this trip did not evoke positive emotions in him. “Thank you for taking us all out of Russia,” Brin said to his father a little later. Already while studying at Stanford University, Sergei began to actively study all kinds of search engines, even wrote several studies on this topic. The acquaintance with Larry Page also took place within the walls of this institution. In 1995, a master's degree student and a mathematics graduate student studied search engines together, and three years later they announced the creation of Google. The business almost immediately began to bear fruit, and already in 2004, Sergey Brin first appeared on the Forbes list with a fortune of $4 billion. On this moment he holds the post of president of technological developments in his own company, raises two children (he and his wife separated in 2013) and actively, like any other person in this top ten, donates money to good causes.
5th place. Larry Page
Net worth: $29.7 billion.
Larry Page was ahead of his friend and colleague, Sergey Brin, by several million dollars. The future co-founder of Google was born into a family that taught computer science at the University of Michigan, so even from childhood the future billionaire showed interest in high technology. It’s unlikely that a guy from a small (by American standards) town could then think that his favorite business would help him rise to 19th place in Forbes, but the meeting of his life at Stanford University with Sergei Brin gave him hope for success. The phenomenal achievements of Google allowed the tandem of creators to even buy a Boeing 767 passenger plane for $320 million. In 2011, Page took over as chief executive director, replacing Eric Schmidt, who has held this position for ten years. As of May 2015, the corporation's hierarchy remained as such: Larry deals with management issues, and Sergei is responsible for technological developments.
4th place. Mark Zuckerberg
Net worth: $33.4 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg - founder of the social Facebook networks, Time magazine's Person of the Year 2010, a philanthropist for Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, and one of Forbes' youngest billionaires. This list can be continued indefinitely, because Mark is an excellent example of the fact that you can achieve anything in this life, the main thing is to show perseverance. Zuckerberg earned his first billion at the age of 23, just 10 months after Facebook opened to all Internet users (at first the site was available only to students with email in the .edu domain zone). Many films have been made about the life of Zuckerberg and the development of his company, but most of all viewers were interested in Aaron Sorkin’s film “The Social Network”, filmed in 2010. It’s worth watching this creation, if only because the culprit himself approved the script, although at that time the film had already been in theaters for a year. The director not only told the story of the site’s creation well, but was also able to show Zuckerberg’s far from easy character. All of Mark’s loved ones will confirm that this guy is not easy to communicate with, but his strong life principles helped found one of the most valuable brands of our time (last year Facebook took 29th position in the Best Global Brands ranking), and also contributed to his marriage to Priscilla Chan (Priscilla Chan). Zuckerberg currently serves as CEO of Facebook and also owns 19% of the company's shares.
3rd place. Jeff Bezos
Net worth: $34.8 billion.
The bronze award for third place on our list goes to another American who, in 1994, realized that the Internet was an ideal platform for selling goods. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, was a pioneer in online bookselling, so the formula successful business on the Web he had to develop it himself. At first, Bezos even forced his employees to walk outside other stores with signs saying “Not found.” the right book? Check out Amazon.com." But the company had orders from the first day of work, but Netscape and Yahoo helped to reach the mark of “100 books sold in an hour” just a year after opening, which placed a link to Jeff’s website on their main pages. In 1998, after the IPO, it was decided to expand the store’s assortment by adding music discs and video products to the virtual shelves. Currently, Amazon.com sells 34 types of goods (household appliances, food, software and much more). As for Jeff Bezos himself, the post of chief executive is not the only joy in his life. In 2000, the billionaire acquired the Blue Origin company, which specializes in launching private spacecraft, and in 2010, the publishing house The Washington Post was added to his assets, acquired for $250 million.
2nd place. Larry Ellison
Net worth: $54.3 billion.
Fate began to test Larry Ellison, the future founder of Oracle, from early childhood. His own mother abandoned him when he was not even a year old, and his adoptive parents considered the boy a failure due to problems with his studies. After graduating from school, Ellison could not find his calling in life for a long time, so the future billionaire had to be content with small part-time jobs. But everything changed as soon as Larry learned about the existence of computers. He immediately began studying programming and a few years later moved to California to write custom software. In 1974, fate brought Ellison to small company Amtex. It was here that our main character created the “ideal database” Oracle, which served as the foundation for opening his own business. “The program was too good to just be sold,” said Larry. As a result, Oracle became one of the fastest growing companies in America and already in 1986 brought in $584 million. But after just four years, the corporation found itself on the verge of bankruptcy: the market value had dropped by 80 percent, and the number of lawsuits had gone beyond all reasonable limits. Ellison had to rethink his approach to accounting, fire old managers and make every effort to improve the software he sold. In 1991, Oracle began to turn a profit again. Larry always wanted to become rich, and he succeeded - already in 2000, his fortune was estimated at $48 billion. But he has not yet succeeded in achieving success on the personal front (all four marriages ended in divorce). But it is unlikely that Larry Ellson, who ranks fifth in the Forbes ranking, is very worried about this. And he still has two children from his third wife, Barbara Booth.
1 place. Bill Gates
Net worth: $79.2 billion.
The winner on our list goes to Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, who earns $6,700 per minute. He first became the richest person on the planet in 1996, and it is noteworthy that the situation has not changed since then. Only in 2008, Warren Buffett and Carlos Slim Al managed to move Bill to third place, but within 12 months his name again appeared in the leading position of the Forbes world ranking. But the computer corporation is not the only achievement in Gates’ life. In 1994, he and his wife Melinda founded a charitable foundation that is now the largest in the world, with approximately $35 billion under its control. William Henry Gates is often considered a billionaire without higher education, but in 2007 Bill still received his diploma Harvard University, who quit in 1975 during his sophomore year to devote himself full-time to programming. Now the first number of Forbes holds the post of chairman of the board of directors of Microsoft, but every year he devotes more and more time to the development of his fund, the main goal of which is to combat global world problems.
All data on the financial status of billionaires was taken from the official Forbes ranking, current as of May 2015.
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Many might assume that in the United States. After all, the US is home to such programming luminaries as Bill Gates, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Donald Knuth. But India is famous for its universities, for example, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), and hackers from Russia are considered very effective. Is there a way to determine which country has better programmers?
HackerRank's research helped answer this question.
HackerRank regularly hosts tens of thousands of programming competitions for developers to improve their coding skills. Hundreds of thousands of developers from around the world compete in a variety of programming languages and areas, from Python to security algorithms to distributed systems. Developers are evaluated and placed on a leaderboard based on speed and accuracy in completing tasks.
According to HackerRank, the most talented programmers live in Russia and China. Chinese programmers outperform all other countries in mathematics, functional programming, and data structure problems, while Russians dominate algorithms, the most popular and most competitive field. Although the United States and India provide greatest number competition participants, they occupy only 28 and 31 places in the ranking, respectively.
Which areas are most popular?
HackerRank offers 15 competitions for developers to take part in, covering a variety of industries, but some are more popular than others. The table below shows the percentage of competitions completed for each programming area.
The most popular area of programming today is algorithms. About 40% of all developers compete in it. This area includes complex tasks by sorting data, dynamic programming, keyword searches and other logic-based tasks. Developers can use any language to participate in these competitions, but their choice may partly explain why a particular language is so popular. (Algorithms are also critical for technical interviews that can lead to hiring programmers.) By a large margin in percentage terms, the second and third places are occupied by Java tasks and data structures, which account for approximately 10% of the participants each. Distributed systems and security are the least popular areas.
So, based on the results of these competitions, which countries' programmers showed the best results?
To answer this question, the average score of each country in all areas was taken. Before finding the mean, the scores were standardized for each area (by subtracting the mean from each score and then dividing by the standard deviation), resulting in what is known as the Z score, or standard score. This made it possible to compare similar characteristics of individual indicators in different areas programming, even though some areas are more complex than others. Z-scores were then tabulated from 1 to 100 for easy interpretation.
The table below shows data for the 50 countries with the largest number of developers on HackerRank. People from these countries have taken part in thousands of competitions (at least 2000).
Since China scored the highest, Chinese developers occupy the top position of the list with a score of 100. But China won by a narrow margin. Russia scored 99.9 out of 100, while Poland and Switzerland rounded out the top ranking with scores around 98. Pakistan, in 50th place, scored just 57.4 points out of 100.
The two countries with the largest number of developers participating in the competition, India and the United States, are not even in the top half of the list. India is ranked 31st with a total score of 76, while the United States is ranked 28th with a score of 78.
Which country has the best developers in specific areas?
Although China has outperformed other countries on average, it does not dominate across the board. Which country do they represent? best developers V specific areas programming? Let's look at the leading countries for each area.
It's no surprise that China outperforms other countries in some areas. Chinese developers are unrivaled in the fields of data structures, mathematics and functional programming.
On the other hand, Russia dominates algorithms, the most popular field. Here China and Poland occupy second and third places, respectively.
What explains different countries' success levels in different areas? One possible explanation is that, for example, Russian programmers are more likely to participate in competitions related to algorithms and therefore practice more in this area, while Chinese developers are more likely to solve data structure problems.
A comparison was also made of how developers from each country split their time between different types of tasks, and then which areas of programming the average HackerRank member prefers. This made it possible to find out which countries are more likely than others to pass the test in a particular area.
Countries and their likelihood of passing the test in a particular area. Countries with significantly high or low percentages of completion of targets in a particular area. Columns from left to right: programming area; high probability; low probability.
The table above shows that Chinese programmers participated in mathematics competitions much more often than would be expected given the preferences of the average developer. This helps explain how they achieved the number one ranking in this area. And, for example, Czech developers show great interest in Shell competitions, an area in which they take first place.
But beyond these two examples, the table seems to show little similarity between a country's choice of a particular type of competition and its performance in that area.
It is also interesting to know if certain countries have preferences in programming languages? Is it true that C++ is the most popular language in India? Or that most Mexicans choose Ruby?
The following chart shows the share of competitions in each language by country.
In general, developers of different nationalities participate in Java competitions more often than in any other programming language (with some exceptions, such as Malaysia and Pakistan, where C++ is preferred, and Taiwan, where Python dominates). Sri Lanka ranks first among countries that prefer Java. India, which has the largest number of developers on HackerRank, ranks 8th.
Which country never loses?
When a developer enters a HackerRank competition, they have a score of 0 before showing any progress. Switzerland has the lowest percentage of zero developers, making Swiss coders the hardest working programmers in the world.
Which country will win the programming Olympics?
Every day, developers around the world compete with each other to become the next Gates or Knuth. If we hold the Olympics among developers, based on the data discussed above, we can assume that China will take gold, Russia will take silver, and Poland will take bronze. Although they certainly deserve praise for the results they are showing now, while the USA and India are not even in the top 25.
Linus Torvalds, Donald Knuth, Richard Stallman, John Carmack - if not a name, then a legend. The online publication VentureBeat lists the most authoritative programmers in the global IT community.
Linus Torvalds
Created Linux, a free operating system, in a dorm room at the University of Helsinki. Today, data centers and supercomputers run on Linux, and it is developed by a horde of open-source fans around the world.
Torvalds is known, in particular, for the fact that he does not mince words and does not try to please the public. At one of his recent talks, when he was asked from the audience whether he was scaring off members of the Linux community with his manner of communication, he replied: “I don’t give a damn about you.” There are the same jokes about Torvalds among developers as there are among ordinary people about Chuck Norris. For example, Torvalds can divide by zero and play 3D games by executing their source code in his mind in real time.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
The only one on this list who managed to earn a knighthood was knighted by the British Queen Elizabeth II. He is the creator of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the technology on which the entire Internet is built.
He now heads the Alliance for Affordable Internet, a public organization supported by Google, Facebook and Microsoft, which has set out to make broadband Internet possible. accessible to people Worldwide.
Donald Knuth
His academic work in computer science earned him the title "Father of Algorithm Analysis". Everything is online, from the Facebook feed selection algorithm to the selection algorithm similar products on Amazon, owes something to him. At 77, he is writing a book called "The Art of computer programming" Knuth is also a professor emeritus at Stanford.
Brendan Ike
Language Creator Java programming Script, which in fact is a standard for web programming. Participated in the creation of Mozilla, a company that develops Firefox browser. He resigned as CEO when his financial support for a project to ban gay marriage in California became known.
Solomon Hikes
Creator of Docker, a technology that developers love because it packages an application and its entire environment into containers and delivers it to servers. Works like a virtual machine, but much faster. Docker began as a side-project at dotCloud, but when the product turned out to be popular, the company experienced a pivot and soon became a unicorn.
Mark Zuckerberg
Creator of Facebook. Believes that the smaller and more flexible the team, the more successful it will be. The billion-dollar social network is served by “only” 10,000 people around the world.
David Heinemeier Hansson
Known as DHH. Creator of Ruby on Rails, a super popular framework that earned him the title and Google's Hacker of the Year award in 2005.
Richard Stallman
He is known primarily for his fight for free software, the founder of GNU, the author of the idea of “copyleft” - as opposed to copyright. Very principled, does not use any proprietary developments.
Bram Cohen
The creator of the BitTorrent protocol, which gave users the ability to download files super fast. BitTorrent is incredibly popular, with a conservative estimate of its total user base at 250 million people worldwide. Last year, Thom Yorke tried to distribute the album exclusively through BitTorrent. And yet, the capabilities of BitTorrent were primarily appreciated by Internet pirates.
James Gosling
Created the Java programming language while working at Sun Microsystems. After the company's takeover by Oracle in 2010, Gosling left, becoming one of Oracle's main critics. Since then, he worked for five months at Google until he joined the startup Liquid Robotics. He is also part of the team of the famous Ukrainian startup Jelastic as an independent director.
Björn Stroustrup
The Danish programmer created the C++ programming language in 1978, improving C. He is still active: he teaches at Texas A&M University, Columbia University, and is also employed at Morgan Stanley.
John Carmack
Co-founder of id Software. He is known all over the world as the creator of Doom. By the way, the idea for the game itself was born during a game of D&D, which the team held regularly at id Software headquarters for several years. Moreover, John was always the game master. He was the first to try out 3D graphics tricks that are still used today.
He is currently working at Oculus VR, which Facebook bought for $2 billion.
