Giants of IT. The giants on whose shoulders we stand. One each day | Hacker News Reader

Giants of IT. The giants on whose shoulders we stand. One each day

giantsofit.org

57 pointsantonpirker45 comments

Im kind of unsure as to how to interpret this, but there appears to be no particular ordering just an influential cs person posted for each day of the month.

Theres definitely pleanty of influencers missing from the current set, McCarthy, Hoare, Dijkstra, to name few. If this were my list, I wouldnt have Lovelace or Gates on it, but most of the others seem warrented enough (in my opinion of course) :)

hi. indeed it is just a list of persons in no particular ordering.

The persons you name are of course on the list. Lovelace already visible the others will appear in the future. So every day one person is added.

If you have other persons you want to see on the list you can submit person with a link in the footer of the page.

gotcha. nice job btw :)

thx!

A small correction on Gates: he did not create BASIC. “The language BASIC was an acronym for Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It was developed by Dartmouth mathematicians John George Kemeny and Tom Kurtzas as a teaching tool for undergraduates.”[1]

The rest generally applies.

[1] http://inventors.about.com/od/famousinventions/fl/The-Histor...

Just curious but why not Lovelace or gates?

Well, Lovelace disputedly created the first program for the Babbage machine under Babbage's guidance. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#Controversy_over_...). Although, more difficult perhaps than morse code I wouldnt consider the first person to send morse code a "Giant" by merit of that act alone... And Gates well, thats too long of a story, but for me it boils down to the fact that I dont think he created outstanding products and he didnt contribute to theoretical CS or EE in any direct way. About the only case you can make for him is as an entrepreneur or visionary, for which I personally think there are other candidates that have better arguments for that position.

Babbage created the machine and he would not know how to run it? He would not know how to program it? The absurdity of this is astounding. Babbage was the first programmer. There is a google talk about Babbage's machines and the speaker also talked about Ada at the 36 min mark -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7K5p_tBcrd0&feature=youtu.be...

Agreed. Gates is a marketing genius. Put him in that hall of fame.

To me, Bill Gates will always be what Steve Jobs is to so many.

That being?

The being

Isn't he more like Zuckerberg?

I mean, he DID develop stuff, which Jobs didn't. He just didn't develop groundbreaking stuff, he just sold it better than his competitors.

Hate windows, but windows 3.1 was ground breaking for the tiime and was primarily the reason why computers took off.

It's widely under appreciated how much he championed there being a software industry at all. Most people thought software was just an aside that you threw in with the hardware. Software was also widely pirated and he fought for the notion that people should pay for software so that engineers could have a job building it.

Nice, bookmarked.

But please don't redirect giantsofit.org to your current feature, it makes it tedious to correctly bookmark, and share, the site. Minor but unnecessary annoyance.

Here's another list, probably very similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pioneers_in_computer_s...

Thanks for the link! I will add the missing persons to my list.

Oddly missing Haskell Curry and Robert Feys (type inference), Peter Landin (more or less all modern functional programming[0]), Robin Milner (type inference, ML, CCS), ...

[0] http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/IO-monad-history.html

"classified"? Why not just use the wikipedia pictures for these people?

The license of some of the Wikipedia pictures are preventing me to use them, sorry.

Kudos to you for paying attention to the licensing instead of just ripping them off.

FWIW Bertrand Meyer's picture is licensed CC-BY-SA so you're free to use it as long as you share it with the same license.

This should probably be a Show HN.

It would be interesting if degrees of separation could be shown between all of these giants.

What do you mean with "degree of separation". Could you elaborate?

For example, it would be interesting to see if or how Linus Torvalds connected to Charles Babbage via the various relationships through the IT giants. If there are 4(as an example) people between them, their degree of separation is 4.

It is similar to the Erdös number.

Ah, now I understand. This would be a really cool thing. With this data we could also create graphs of relationships and we also could find the Erdös of IT.

But I think for me this is to much effort to create something like this (One would need to study all the resumes of the giants to find out their relationships and so on.)

But if anyone wants to create something like this I more then willing to give them my list of giants.

What would be the connection?

Perhaps: Has contributed to the same software project

You need an activity to connect them, though. Erdos numbers are based on collaborative math publications. The problem here is that some are researches (you could do cs publications), some are software developers (torvalds, gates), and some are just really influential.

Yes, but what is their Bacon number?

Good page! But Bill Gates did not develop BASIC or DOS.

I know :) It's a trap! (And the real authors are in the list too, but will show up later this year)

True, DOS was purchased as Q-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, and was adapted to become MS-DOS which was also a copy of CP/M, (http://www.bernd-leitenberger.de/qdos.shtml).

As far as BASIC goes it was designed in 64 at Dartmought College (http://www.jake.dk/programmering/qbasic/dk/historien.html). I think Gates did develop a dialect of it though...

Gates (along with Allen) did however implement BASIC on quite a few machines. BASIC is a very simple interpreted language, but it was technically impressive to get it running on certain machines of the day as well as it opening the doors to countless other people to begin their journey programming.

Which is irrelevant because the claim being made is that he created the language.

How many more times am I going to have to read that Ada Lovelace was the first programmer? It is getting to be annoying.

I remembered reading an article regarding this over-hype - https://web.archive.org/web/20060813072159/http://archive.sa...

Also this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7K5p_tBcrd0&feature=youtu.be... jumping to minute 36 where Ada is discussed by the speaker.

Tim Berners Lee should be on your list on the first place!

Maybe they're going in a chronological fashion.

Hi!

It's not a best of or top 100 list or something, it is in random order. But Tim Berners Lee is of course on my list, so he will show up in the future.

i first thought it is by birth/or death date. some relation to "now" might make this more interesting, like the astronomy picture of the day. if there are two on the same day they could simply be shifted.

on the start page (http://www.giantsofit.org/) you will be redirected to the person of today. i just posted here the first person because the person of today (jack kilby) has no image.

or do you mean more something like to have the person show on on her/his birthday or day of death?

I think he means the date is of special interest to that person. ie, birthday, deathday, day they released the first version of programming language x, day they founded company y, day product z sold it's first million copies, etc. Or even keeping it topical such as with a new release of OS X you could have one of the core designers / developers of the first version of MacOS.

It would make the list much more interesting, but would be significantly harder to curate and would require you add some additional blurb to explain why that individual was chosen for that day of the year. So I can't blame you for going down the lower maintenance route of just compiling a random order list of influential figures.

There's something about "random" order that doesn't sit comfortably with someone like myself. I'd agree that some kind of connection to today's date, e.g. birthday, release date, etc. would be good. Or even something simple like making the entire list alphabetical or chronological (that would of course entail preparing the entire list in advance, but if you still want to take suggestions then those suggestions could be for next year's list).

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