

Ask HN: Great programmers and computer scientists of today?  - playing_colours

Who do you consider the best programmers &#x2F; computer scientists of today? Or, in other words, if you are familiar with Coders At Work [1], what names would you suggest for a new edition of the book?<p>[1] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.codersatwork.com&#x2F;
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dottrap
Roberto Ierusalimschy (best known as the creator of Lua).

On the science/research side, his work with Lua has explored language
interoperability in a methodical way. He also brought about the first real-
world implementation of a register-based virtual machine and gave an apples-
to-apples comparison of its merits (Lua 4 to Lua 5). His research also led to
the resurrection of the popularity of asymmetric coroutines and parseable
expression grammars (PEGs).

From an engineering standpoint, Lua is one of the cleanest languages ever made
and it has impacted the video game industry as much as John Carmack (in
different ways). The register based virtual machine white paper Roberto wrote
was also the inspiration of Apple's Squirrelfish Javascript VM, which kicked
off a tidal wave of Javascript VM wars.

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geophile
Mike McMahon:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_McMahon_(computer_scientis...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_McMahon_\(computer_scientist\))

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geophile
Someone will mention Jeffrey Dean of Google.

~~~
playing_colours
Facts about Jeffrey Dean: [http://www.quora.com/Jeff-Dean/What-are-all-the-
Jeff-Dean-fa...](http://www.quora.com/Jeff-Dean/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-
facts)

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geophile
Fabrice Bellard

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tokenrove
Arthur Whitney

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phaus
John Carmack

