Faces behind Popular Programming Languages
After the popularity of Faces behind Popular Linux Distros , here’s another article about faces behind popular programming language. It’s quite fascinating to become familiar with the faces behind these programming languages, in which we spend hours learning or using it. Although the list may not be comprehensive but it contains almost all the popular programming language used in modern times. So here we go.
PHP
Rasmus Lerdorf (born November 22, 1968 in Qeqertarsuaq, Greenland) is a Danish-Greenlandic programmer and is most notable as the creator of the PHP programming language. He authored the first two versions.
Python
Guido van Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language. In the Python community, Van Rossum is known as a “Benevolent Dictator for Life” (BDFL), meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary. He is currently employed by Google, where he spends half his time working on Python development.
Ruby
Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matsumoto Yukihiro, a.k.a. Matz, born 14 April 1965) is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language and its reference implementation, Matz’s Ruby Interpreter (MRI). He was born in Osaka Prefecture, in western Honshū. According to an interview conducted by Japan Inc., he was a self-taught programmer until the end of high school. He graduated with an information science degree from Tsukuba University, where he associated himself with research departments dealing with programming languages and compilers.
Ruby on Rails
(though Ruby on Rails is an open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language)
David Heinemeier Hansson is a Danish programmer and the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework and the Instiki wiki. He is also a partner at the web-based software development firm 37signals.
Perl
Larry Wall (born September 27, 1954) is a programmer and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987.
JavaScript
Brendan Eich (born 1961) is a computer programmer and creator of the JavaScript programming language. He is the Chief Technology Officer at the Mozilla Corporation.
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Sources: WIKIPEDIA
None of the above is a programming language, but scripts for specific tasks!
Okay, python is kinda a programming language, but come on!
With none of these scripts you can really do something – REAL application (not web app…).
So I want to know what are the faces behind popular programming languages:
I can’t figure why would anyone want to use that syntax!).
C, C++, Pascal, Delphi, Java, C# (I intentionally ignore VB!
Hope I’ll get my request
@ Bits
C, C++ those guys are too old and retired too(no offense intended)
you can read about them here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie
And C# is not developed by single person or two, Microsoft developed it.
“I intentionally ignore VB!
I can’t figure why would anyone want to use that syntax!”
VB.Net is a legitimate language which is excellent for RAD. While (imo) it’s not as good as C# (as C# forces OO methods upon the author so it’s harder to be lazy) it is very close as it has become a clean, managed, efficient language. VB has a bad rep because of what came before it, but it was rebuilt years ago and people who still think it’s terrible obviously don’t keep up with advancements in programming technologies.
wtf.. a one in three chance the next big coding language thing will have Danish blood.
Bits Whisperer – you’re dead wrong. You can write full apps in Ruby, Python and Perl without going anywhere near a web application. SDL (Simple Directmedia Layer) bindings exist for all three, as do binding for GTK allowing both games and regular apps to be developed. Look no further than Frozen Bubble for a game written in Perl that is more than just a web app. I’ve written simple Perl-GTK apps myself.
And besides, what is a scripting language other than just another name for an interpreted programming language anyway?
Dominic, think about it: creating a programming language takes a lot of lateral thinking. Now, just how would one go about entering such a mental state? Hmmm….
Bits, I think you need a primer on the definition of “Programming Language”. The term ’script’ merely means a specific language implementation that is compiled and run in one operation, and recompiled every time it is run (barring implementation optimizations e.g. mod_perl). IOW, script refers to a run time environment, not what is being run. And ‘compiler’ is omnipresent, just in scripting generally the instructions they emit are executed immediately and discarded.
To be a general purpose Programming Language, now, is a somewhat stronger constraint. First, it must be demonstrated that it is possible to implement a Turing machine in it. If it can do this, then it is a “Turing Complete” language, and anything currently considered computable can be implemented in it. (equivalently, if it can be shown to be able to implement a compiler for some other language that has itself met this requirement, it is also Turing Complete.) Secondly, its run time environment must be a well defined machine, with specific state variables and state modulation operators. Third, the language must be specified by a well defined syntax, and valid statements in the language (i.e. ones that exhibit valid syntax) must have corresponding well-defined semantic effects on the machine state. Fourth, though a bit weaker, it should be usable by mere mortals, though this is not an absolute necessity.
Minimal requirements can be summed up as: addressable variables and instruction storage space(s), conditional branching, and two-operand operators. Look at Peano arithmetic for just how minimal that last needs to be. Conditional branching allows for loops and subroutines, although a subroutine is something that can be built in a Turing machine, an emergent property of it if you would, and not a fundamental ability. Indeed, subroutines were a relatively late entry into the field, and stacks even later as an implementation aid for them. Everything else, and I mean everything, is superstructure aimed solely at expressiveness and readability. Not a one of any of the by now several hundred languages can do anything that can not be done by any other. The only differences are related to how directly they can express the concepts for a particular problem’s solution, how good one must be as a programmer to internalize same, and how effectively it is possible to implement machines and compilers to make them actually useful.
Needless to say, all the above are Turing Complete. .BAT from the old DOS days was not, and perhaps its echoes are what led you to your statement?
@The Bits Whisperer
PHP has a CLI and GTK binding as well. It works perfectly well dealing with the OS instead of a web server. The tasks that you can use these modern high-level languages for are definitely non-specific. Just because you can’t inline ASM and peek and poke random RAM addresses doesn’t mean that it’s not a programming language. (Can you do that with Java?)
Also, in your list of ‘real’ popular programming languages, you left out Cobol and Fortran – was that intentional?
@Bit Whisperer: I feel pity for you, man. What, for gods sake, did VB to you that you must hate it and behave like a racist. Have you ever heard of MSIL? So what do you think is produced by your c# compiler? And by the VB compiler? And because you can’t understand the syntax of the Mongolian language, does it mean, it is worthless or not full functional? Grow up, man.
[...] Faces behind Popular Programming Languages It’s quite fascinating to become familiar with the faces behind these programming languages, in which we spend hours learning or using it. Although the list may not be comprehensive but it contains almost all the popular programming language used in modern times. [...]
Bits, you’re an idiot. The above are all programming languages. Precompilation is not a requirement of a language. If that were true, what would you say of lisp, or its derivatives like scheme?
[...] Faces behind Popular Programming Languages – A good article which shows you who developed some of the most well known programming languages in the world. [...]
A lot of Neeeeeeeeeerds!!!!!
[...] Posted by chicodj on November 4, 2008 People from Popular Programming Languages [...]
I knew the guy who invented perl would look something like that…
Larry Wall, one of the greatest/craziest !
Ummmm, isn’t the point to see the faces of these guys, not to argue about what is and isn’t a programming language? This is just like the meetings I go to. Are we that scatter-brained these days that we can’t just stay on topic and stop to appreciate some new input? Thanks for the post!!
I’ve been a programmer for 11 years. These are shit languages. None of them are serious development languages. Just languages that web developers want to think are programming languages.
A serious programming language need not be precompiled, but it actually has to be useful beyond something like scripting languages or simple interpreted software.
PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, Java, and Javascript all fall under the category of “Sorry, not a serious programming language.”
Languages like C, C++, C#, Lisp, Forth, or, yes, BASIC *are* programming languages because they actually allow for something powerful to be made. Yes, for the most part these languages are harder to write in, but the fact matters that they’re not jokes meant almost purely for WEB DEVELOPMENT!
Scripting Languages != Programming Languages
One is used for Web Pages, one is used for actual software.
@Steve sure you can write “real” apps in these toy languages. You can also put lambo doors on a honda civic. I think the more important question here is why would you?
It can actually be much worse than this. I’ve read a question asked at an actual university-level examination in computer science that listed “C++, Java and XML” as prominent examples of “web programming languages”.
@Anonymous immediately above
I wonder what on earth made you classify Java as a “Sorry, not a serious programming language.” but put C# under serious and powerful category? Which is that feature making C# so much more powerful than Java?
[...] http://yabblog.com/2008/11/01/faces-behind-popular-languages/ Published [...]
Take a chill pill guys,
I think you need to differ between low-level languages and high-level languages – both are essential for software development.
Although low-level languages will do better on a per machine basis higher-level languages will do better on a more global scale…
Yes you can design a really good photoshop app that will knock the wind out everybody’s sails using C++, and would probably render every single image 100 times faster than anything else out there – but will probably crash and burn on Vista (because when you started it, it was still the XP era), won’t really work on MAC’s and might even have a few bugs on Linux…
While someone else can create a small App with ActionScript 3, Flash and PHP that would probably not reach your App performance but, mounted on a server and accessed by a 1,000 people will reach more people (and probably won’t crash on different platforms – cause web compatibility is about 10 times easier)
Where’s Java? Or is that on the out. Long live Python!
GrayGaffer, you are wrong about DOS batch files.
The language used in batch files is usually referred to as a scripting language but it is in-fact Turing-complete hence is actually a programming language.
Just FWSE for – ‘Turing complete batch file’
I think it’s funny how all of them look like relatively normal people. Except for Larry Wall. Who looks like a pedophile.
[...] out the creators of PERL and other well known computer programming languages in Faces behind popular languages. Posted in Off Beaten Track, Personal [...]
Bits … you should continue Whispering to your self .
I don’t like python either(I’m an unashamed VB/c# boy), but it is used to program a lot of very serious apps. Look at the client for eve-online, entirely pythoned.
fugu: you thinking as far back as before DOS 3.0? The original .BAT did not have full conditionals so it could not do a generic loop. It did not allow full 8 bit ASCII so you could not echo to a CMD file and then run (though I think that is a cheat trick – the computation is not being done in the .BAT execution environment, instead the Turing Completeness of the underlying computer is being hijacked). Still cannot, really – put a ^M in and it can get dropped as a carriage return by the low level DOS text mode file handler. There was no dbg. .BAT was initially simply a way of listing a sequence of commands. As of DOS 6 however yes, it was Turing complete. sh gave Bill and Paul a little goosing in the shell scripting area.
You “real programmers” out there, did you miss the Turing class? And what pray is missing in web apps that makes them not ‘real’? You don’t have to walk backwards uphill both ways to write them?
But yes, this was a faces blog, not a language appreciation conclave (apart from some disagreement as to whether or not some people ‘deserved’ to be included).
Did you notice they are all Open Source? The authors of the more traditional languages deserved inclusion – Kernighan and Ritchie for C, Bjarne Stroustrup for C++, the back-room geniuses led by Anders Hejlsberg at Microsoft for C#, James Gosling for Java. And (I’m biased;) I would really like to see the father of compilers technology Tony Hoare in here somewhere. Then of course that leads to an infinite regression through Von Neuman, Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, etc etc back to the Persian Astrolabe inventors. Another blog I guess.
‘popular’ has multiple meanings – COBOL anybody? More lines of COBOL still running than any other language. FORTH is another below-the-horizon language. Every single Mac uses a system called “Open Firmware” as its boot system, responsible for building the PCI device tree, finding the boot volume and sector, configuring the CPU for the emulation mode, etc. What is it written in? FORTH. Until small footprint / embedded Linux came along, telescope and space probe automation was all written in FORTH too. So there should be a picture of Charles Moore. There is still a lot of FORTH around today too. There’s a new large multi-core chip out, 40 cores IIRC, also uses FORTH as its operating basis. And I briefly mentioned sh above – it and its derivatives carried the early growth of the Internet www servers on their backs, in the days before Perl. Then Smalltalk, used for most large banking systems not based on COBOL, and which was responsible for seriously starting the OOP craze.
I think there might be a little confusion going around as to the difference between the power of a language (they are all the same – Turing Complete), the domain-specific expressive power of a language, and the libraries shipped with it allowing for code re-use. All of the languages mentioned in the blog derive from an almost forgotten common root – ALGOL by Niklaus Wirth – and they are all run on Von Neuman architecture computers. Still. And they all have what is really nearly identical syntax and semantics in the language specs. Well, except for some functional stuff creeping in, closures in Javascript, RE text shortcuts Larry introduced in Perl, source code and functions as first class data types, run time class construction and code self-modification, stuff like that, that C++/C#/Java (deliberately for safety reasons) do not implement (well, with some effort Java can be coerced to do some AOP via its introspection, and C# does have a run-time compiler that can be used to instantiate code). The differences are all really conveniences, not intrinsics. Not to trivialize the enormous creativity and effort that has gone into each one to get them to the point where they have a self-sustaining user base and a rich body of reuse modules/libraries. Choice is good.
neeerds. maybe. It’s not that I’m a computer wonk/historian. Far from it – I’m a practitioner, but I’ve been that since the early 60’s, and watched all this stuff happen around me. I do not think there is any other field where one can spend a lifetime constantly inventing stuff that has never been done before and being paid to do it (invitation to flame here). It’s addictive. I haven’t had a life since I took my first 8088 PC home. Look at my timestamp – it’s 2:30 am already.
It’s a computer. Nothing takes ‘five minutes’. And it never stops.
Hey darkkraft – Sit on it!
The man who made PERL is definitely the coolest
> Scripting Languages != Programming Languages
> One is used for Web Pages, one is used for actual software.
I couldn’t agree more on that comment.
NERDS!
cool seeing the PHP guy – I love PHP!
[...] JavaScript’in asıl yüzlerinden yani mucitlerinden bahsedeceğim. Aslında ingilizce olarak bu kaynakta yeterince bilgi var. Ancak sizler için Türkçe olarak Wikipedia’dan birkaç cümle [...]
Thank you for this very nice information.
All those who say they aren’t programming language: You obviously haven’t heard of prototyping? on the other hand, I run several GUI apps daily written in these languages. Third they are all turing complete. Fourth, you can compile them all to machine code if it is so wished, but the point of scripting languages is to live with the performance loss at runtime instead of waiting a few minutes to test that new bit of code you just typed all the time. Finally, C# and Java aren’t totally compiled languages either, they compile to a scripted in between machine code like language. They themselves are therefore not programming languages under your definition.
Any language that is turing complete is technically a programming language. Whatever it’s main/original use.
yes, but the ‘for next’ loop in C is to die for.
[...] zum Artikel [...]
Guido looks like a fun guy
I imagined them wearing some bling
Nothing seems to be easier than seeing someone whom you can help but not helping.
I suggest we start giving it a try. Give love to the ones that need it.
God will appreciate it.
ITT: insecurities.
Matsumoto David H H are actually kind of cute.
Brendan should have gone to Specsavers. Those glasses are totally the wrong size and shape for his face.
However, nice work on Javascript. Carry on.
@Bits – Are you serious? I think you might be surprised at how much of the tech world (not just the web) has migrated towards “scripted” languages. I’ll be the first to point out the drawbacks of interpreted languages (which are admittedly becoming less of a factor) but the facts remain.
@ those who say VB is a useless language
I am going to be a 3rd year student, using Visual Studio I was able to create a pretty secure Project/Asset/Value system for a very big project. Compiled very small and very variable so they can change server locations/Passwords/and usernames (during run time) while I am back at school partying with the big bonus I just got. VB just scares you guys cause pretty soon the people with the brains about how these should work are going to be the same people that create them(though im sure people who use to write these systems are smarter than the business guys). And if they do need something adhoc they can load the data into access to make reports/queries with out knowing any programming.
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This is such a cool article, I love learning more about the people behind the design and development community!
Awesome… now I know who to direct my anger at.
What a great people. I really adore them. Hats off to you guys.
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