Coders at Work website is up and open to suggestions

Aaron Swartz wrote something noteworthy? If so, it's not web.py.<p> How about:<p> - Fabrice Bellard. wrote QEMU, TinyCC, FFMPEG, and an awesome IOCCC entry<p> - Miguel de Icaza. wrote GNOME, Mono<p> - Larry Page, Sergey Brin. wrote a program to DoS attack webservers<p> - Bram Moolenaar. wrote everyone's favorite text editor<p> - Richard Stallman. wrote two operating systems, one in Lisp (called 'emacs'), one in C (called 'GNU'). authored the GPL<p> - Bjarne Stroustrup. created C++<p> - Robert Morris. created the Internet Worm (aka "Morris Worm")

If I had a dozen votes I'd probably use them all on Jamie Zawinski.<p>His wicked blend of humor, cynicism, realism and practicality make for some fascinating stories and actually <i>useful</i> advice.<p>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.<p>Peter Norvig called him "One of the best programmers I ever hired" - <a href="http://norvig.com/21-days.html" rel="nofollow">http://norvig.com/21-days.html</a><p>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. :)<p> 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 <i>"Programmers at work"</i> <a href="http://tinyurl.com/3cb2qk" rel="nofollow">http://tinyurl.com/3cb2qk</a> would be good. I would add also ...<p>- Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, (Mac dev team) <a href="http://www.folklore.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.folklore.org</a><p>- Michael Abrash (Dr. Dobbs & PC Graphics) <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Abrash" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Abrash</a><p>- Brian Kernighan <a href="http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/bwk/" rel="nofollow">http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/bwk/</a>

Clicking on the names leads you to an ghost-town page. <p>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.<p>Lack of a web-based suggestion box makes me think the site is only going to harvest my email and spam me later.<p>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 = $$$$$$$$$$$$<p>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.