Coders at Work website is up and open to suggestions

Aaron Swartz wrote something noteworthy? If so, it's not web.py.

How about:

- Fabrice Bellard. wrote QEMU, TinyCC, FFMPEG, and an awesome IOCCC entry

- Miguel de Icaza. wrote GNOME, Mono

- Larry Page, Sergey Brin. wrote a program to DoS attack webservers

- Bram Moolenaar. wrote everyone's favorite text editor

- Richard Stallman. wrote two operating systems, one in Lisp (called 'emacs'), one in C (called 'GNU'). authored the GPL

- Bjarne Stroustrup. created C++

- Robert Morris. created the Internet Worm (aka "Morris Worm")

If I had a dozen votes I'd probably use them all on Jamie Zawinski.

His wicked blend of humor, cynicism, realism and practicality make for some fascinating stories and actually useful advice.

He's worked with tons of interesting stuff - obviously XEmacs, Netscape and Mozilla, but he also wrote a bunch of code for the legendary Lisp Machines early in his career.

Peter Norvig called him "One of the best programmers I ever hired" - http://norvig.com/21-days.html

You might have to be very persuasive to get an interview though. I think he pretty much hates (1) being famous and (2) the software industry these days!

Gerald Jay Sussman, co-creator of Scheme and co-author of SICP.

Reading the list I think there are frequent misuses of the term "invented". I think terms such as implemented, developed, or even created are more accurate. To say someone "invented" Rails is peculiar: there wasn't much about Rails' concept that was revolutionary, what was (perhaps) revolutionary was its implementation. I am perhaps focusing a bit too much on the trees rather than the forest. :)

As jey's comment points out, selecting the programmers is going to be an arbitrary process. For example its clearly in the vogue to dislike Aaron Swartz, but I can't see why we'd want to focus on Robert Morris if you are going to suggest that the Internet Worm was his great accomplishment (its notoriety is largely the result of a mistake in the implementation causing it to propagate too quickly, or at least so the story goes).

A quick follow-up on "Programmers at work" http://tinyurl.com/3cb2qk would be good. I would add also ...

- Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, (Mac dev team) http://www.folklore.org

- Michael Abrash (Dr. Dobbs & PC Graphics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Abrash

- Brian Kernighan http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/bwk/

Clicking on the names leads you to an ghost-town page.

Lack of any hint as to how I can vote for or against these folks leads me to think there's a good chance people I'd like to hear from will be drowned out by others who I've already heard enough from.

Lack of a web-based suggestion box makes me think the site is only going to harvest my email and spam me later.

The premise has potential, but the implementation is lacking.

Famous people (not necessary the best coders in their team), story of their life = APress book = Money = $$$$$$$$$$$$

There's no measurement how great a coder is. An inventor, a creator, a leader, now those attributes are better topics to write than coders.

Tim Peters, probably the most respected Python developer over Guido himself.