In this fast paced world of information / technology management , our lives revolves our mobile phones, internet , aviation transportation, military intelligence, agriculture , computational medicine and other media which is virtually a part of our every day lives. But we cannot enjoy all these benefits to our lives and businesses without the immense and pain-staking works by highly intellectual men of steel in their vision to make this world a better place .

Listed below are some of the inventors of programming languages that have helped shaped the world .

C language (The Grand One)

Ritchie was born in Bronxville, New York. His father was Alistair E. Ritchie, a longtime Bell Labs scientist and co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits on switching circuit theory. He moved with his family to Summit, New Jersey, as a child, where he graduated from Summit High School.
Career

Ritchie graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. In 1967, he began working at the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center, and in 1968, he received a PhD from Harvard under the supervision of Patrick C. Fischer, his doctoral dissertation being "Program Structure and Computational Complexity".
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, from left to right

Ritchie was best known as the creator of the C programming language, a key developer of the Unix operating system, and co-author of the book The C Programming Language, and was the 'R' in K&R (a common reference to the book's authors Kernighan and Ritchie). Ritchie worked together with Ken Thompson, the scientist credited with writing the original Unix; one of Ritchie's most important contributions to Unix was its porting to different machines and platforms.

The C language is widely used today in application, operating system, and embedded system development, and its influence is seen in most modern programming languages. Unix has also been influential, establishing concepts and principles that are now precepts of computing.

PYTHON (Nairaland was re-written with this)

Guido van Rossum (born 31 January 1956[citation needed]) 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 was employed by Google until 7 December 2012, where he spent half his time developing the Python language. In January, Guido will be moving to Dropbox.

Van Rossum was born and grew up in the Netherlands, where he received a masters degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Amsterdam in 1982. He later worked for various research institutes, including the Dutch Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, Maryland, and the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), Reston, Virginia.

In December 2005, Van Rossum was hired by Google. He wrote a web-based code-review tool for Google in Python.
Personal life

Guido van Rossum is the brother of Just van Rossum, a type designer and also a programmer. Just van Rossum designed the typeface that is used in the "Python Powered" logo. Guido lives in California with his American wife, Kim Knapp,and their son, Orlijn.
Work

While working at the Stichting Mathematisch Centrum (CWI), Guido van Rossum wrote and contributed a glob() routine to BSD Unix in 1986. Van Rossum also worked on the development of the ABC programming language.


COLDFUSION (my favourite)

In 1995 Jeremy D. Allaire co-founded Allaire Corporation with his brother JJ Allaire, creating the web development language ColdFusion. When Macromedia acquired Allaire in March 2001, Mr. Allaire became Chief Technology Officer. At Macromedia, Allaire helped create the Macromedia MX (Flash) platform. He left Macromedia in February 2003 to join venture capital firm General Catalyst.

Allaire founded Brightcove, a Cambridge, MA based company that produces Online Video Platform applications, in early 2004 to create a video distribution platform for the Internet and is now their CEO.

PHP

Rasmus Lerdorf (born 22 November 1968 in Qeqertarsuaq, Greenland) is a Danish programmer with Canadian citizenship. He is best known for creating the PHP scripting language, authoring the first two versions of the language and participating in the development of later versions led by a group of developers including Jim Winstead (who later created blo.gs), Stig Bakken, Shane Caraveo, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski. He continues to contribute to the project.

Early life and education

He graduated from King City Secondary School in 1988, and in 1993 he graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor of Applied Science in Systems Design Engineering. He contributed to the Apache HTTP Server and he added the LIMIT clause to the MSQL DBMS. The LIMIT clause was later adapted by several other DBMS.
Career

From September 2002 to 6 November 2009 he was employed by Yahoo! Inc. as an Infrastructure Architecture Engineer. In 2010, he joined WePay in order to develop their API. Throughout 2011 he was a roving consultant for startups. On 22 February 2012 he announced on Twitter that he had joined Etsy.

Lerdorf is a frequent speaker at Open Source conferences around the world. During his keynote presentation at OSCMS 2007, he presented a security vulnerability in each of the projects represented at the conference that year.

C++

Bjarne Stroustrup, a Danish and British trained computer scientist, began his work on "C with Classes" in 1979. The idea of creating a new language originated from Stroustrup's experience in programming for his Ph.D. thesis. Stroustrup found that Simula had features that were very helpful for large software development, but the language was too slow for practical use, while BCPL was fast but too low-level to be suitable for large software development. When Stroustrup started working in AT&T Bell Labs, he had the problem of analyzing the UNIX kernel with respect to distributed computing. Remembering his Ph.D. experience, Stroustrup set out to enhance the C language with Simula-like features. C was chosen because it was general-purpose, fast, portable and widely used. Besides C and Simula, some other languages that inspired him were ALGOL 68, Ada, CLU and ML. At first, the class, derived class, strong type checking, inlining, and default argument features were added to C via Stroustrup's C++ to C compiler, Cfront. The first commercial implementation of C++ was released on 14 October 1985.

In 1983, the name of the language was changed from C with Classes to C++ (++ being the increment operator in C). New features were added including virtual functions, function name and operator overloading, references, constants, user-controlled free-store memory control, improved type checking, and BCPL style single-line comments with two forward slashes (//). In 1985, the first edition of The C++ Programming Language was released, providing an important reference to the language, as there was not yet an official standard. Release 2.0 of C++ came in 1989 and the updated second edition of The C++ Programming Language was released in 1991. New features included multiple inheritance, abstract classes, static member functions, const member functions, and protected members. In 1990, The Annotated C++ Reference Manual was published. This work became the basis for the future standard. Late feature additions included templates, exceptions, namespaces, new casts, and a Boolean type.

As the C++ language evolved, the standard library evolved with it. The first addition to the C++ standard library was the stream I/O library which provided facilities to replace the traditional C functions such as printf and scanf. Later, among the most significant additions to the standard library, was a large amount of the Standard Template Library.

C++ is sometimes called a hybrid language.

It is possible to write object oriented or procedural code in the same program in C++. This has caused some concern that some C++ programmers are still writing procedural code, but are under the impression that it is object oriented, simply because they are using C++. Often it is an amalgamation of the two. This usually causes most problems when the code is revisited or the task is taken over by another coder.

C++ continues to be used and is one of the preferred programming languages to develop professional applications.

JAVA

In 1977, Gosling received a B.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary. In 1983, he earned a Ph.D in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and his doctoral thesis was titled "Algebraic Constraints". His thesis advisor was Bob Sproull. While working towards his doctorate, he wrote a version of Emacs (gosmacs), and before joining Sun Microsystems he built a multi-processor version of Unix while at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as several compilers and mail systems.
Between 1984 and 2010, Gosling was with Sun Microsystems. He is known as the father of the Java programming language.

On April 2, 2010, Gosling left Sun Microsystems which had recently been acquired by the Oracle Corporation. Regarding why he left, Gosling cited reductions in pay, status, and decision-making ability, change of role, and ethical challenges. He has since taken a very critical stance towards Oracle in interviews, noting that "During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle, where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle." Later, during the Oracle vs. Google trial over Android, he clarified his position saying "Just because Sun didn't have patent suits in our genetic code doesn't mean we didn't feel wronged. While I have differences with Oracle, in this case they are in the right. Google totally slimed Sun. We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan [Schwartz]: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun."

On March 28, 2011, James Gosling announced on his blog that he had been hired by Google. Five months later, he announced that he joined a startup called Liquid Robotics.

Gosling is listed as an advisor at the Scala company Typesafe Inc., launched in May 2011.

RUBY

Born in Osaka Prefecture, he was raised in Tottori Prefecture from the age of four. 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 University of Tsukuba, where he was a member of Ikuo Nakata's research lab on programming languages and compilers. Matsumoto is married and has four children. He is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, did standard service as a missionary and is now a counselor in his church ward.

Matz released the first version of the Ruby programming language on 21 December 1995 and he is still leading the development effort on the reference implementation often called MRI for Matz Ruby Implementation.
mruby

In April 2012, Matz open-sourced his work on a new implementation of the Ruby language called: mruby , a minimal implementation based on his VM called ritevm and which is designed to allow software developers to embed Ruby in other programs while keeping memory footprint small and performance optimized.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org

Where's James Gosling na?
or Ada Lovelace (first computer programmer)

ur list isnt comprehensive enuff . Watabout creators of new waves like haskell, scala, erlang, prolog? Veteran languages like (mccarthy's) lisp?

Do u xpect the OP to include all d programming languages available ? U sef add ur own