List of programming language researchers
The following is list of researchers of programming language theory, design, implementation, and related areas.
A
- Martín Abadi, for the programming language Baby Modula-3 and his book A Theory of Objects
- Samson Abramsky, contributions to the areas of the lazy lambda calculus and concurrency theory and co-editing the 6 Volume Handbook of Logic in Computer Science
- Jean-Raymond Abrial, father of the Z notation and the B-Method, targeted at the clear specification and refinement of computer programs and computer-based systems in general
- Vikram Adve, the 2012 ACM Software System Award for LLVM, a set of compiler and toolchain technologies
- Gul Agha, elected as an ACM Fellow in 2018 for research in concurrent programming and formal methods, specifically the Actor Model
- Alfred Aho, the A of AWK, 2020 Turing Award for fundamental algorithms and theory underlying programming language implementation and for synthesizing these results...highly influential books...
- Frances Allen, the 2006 Turing Award for pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques...
- Andrew Appel, especially well known because of his compiler books, the Modern Compiler Implementation in ML series, as well as Compiling With Continuations
- Krzysztof R. Apt, the use of logic as a programming language
- Bruce Arden, co-authored two compilers, GAT for the IBM 650 and MAD
- Arvind, see [|Arvind Mithal]
- Lennart Augustsson, languages, compilers
B
- Ralph-Johan Back, originated the refinement calculus, used in the formal development of programs using stepwise refinement
- Roland Backhouse, work on the mathematics of program construction and algorithm problem solving; books on Syntax of Programming Languages, Program Construction and Verification, and more
- John Backus, the 1977 Turing Award for profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for seminal publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages
- George N. Baird, the 1974 Grace Murray Hopper Award for his \development and implementation of the Navy's COBOL Compiler Validation System
- Lars Bak, the 2018 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize for pioneering work in pointer-safe object-orientation and leading the implementation of Beta, Self, Strongtalk, Java Hotspot,..., the ACM SIGPLAN 2016 PL Software Award for V8 JavaScript
- Henri Bal, programming languages for distributed systems, e.g. Orca
- Friedrich L. Bauer, proposed the stack method of expression evaluation, member of the ALGOL 60 Committee, see also
- Kent Beck, a leading proponent of test-driven development, pioneered software design patterns, and co-wrote JUnit for Java
- Jeff Bezanson, the 2019 J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software for the co-development of the Julia language
- Dines Bjørner, the Vienna Development Method, the Raise specification language
- Daniel Bobrow, 1992 ACM Software System Award for the IDE named Interlisp
- Corrado Böhm, defined Böhm's language, the first meta-circular evaluator, contributed the structured program theorem
- Grady Booch, developer of Unified Modeling Language
- Kathleen Booth, designed and developed first assembly language
- Stephen R. Bourne, developed ALGOL 68C, member IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi
- Gilad Bracha, the 2017 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize for outstanding work on many topics relevant to OO, including mixins, Java generics, Strongtalk, and Newspeak
- Larry Breed, 1973 Grace Murray Hopper Award for designing and implementing APL\360
- Walter Bright, designer of D
- Per Brinch Hansen, the IEEE Computer Society 2002 Computer Pioneer Award for... Concurrent Pascal
- Kim Bruce, the 2021 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize for... programming language theory and design in general and object orientation specifically
- Margaret Burnett, pioneering contributions to visual programming languages
- Rod Burstall, languages COWSEL, POP-2, NPL, Hope; ACM SIGPLAN 2009 PL Achievement Award
- Richard Burton, the 1992 ACM Software System Award for the IDE called Interlisp
C
- Luca Cardelli, research in type theory and operational semantics, helped develop Modula-3 and Polyphonic C#, first compiler for ML, the 2007 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize,
- Craig Chambers, the 2011 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize for the design of Cecil and his work on compiler techniques used to implement OO languages...
- John Chambers, the 1998 ACM Software System Award for the programing language S
- K. Mani Chandy, contributions to the verification of parallel programming languages, including the language UNITY
- Alonzo Church, the Lambda calculus; considered a founder of computer science
- John Cocke, the 1987 Turing Award for significant contributions in the design and theory of compilers,..., and...; co-developed the CYK parsing algorithm
- Alain Colmerauer, creator of Prolog
- Richard W. Conway, for the introductory languages CORC and CUPL and the student-oriented dialect PL/C; for extensive error correction so that every program compiled
- William Cook, chief architect of AppleScript, the 2014 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize for contributions to the theory and practice of OO programming
- Keith Cooper, research on programming languages, compilers, optimization, and static analysis
- Thierry Coquand, ACM SIGPLAN 2013 PL Software Award, and 2015 ACM Software System Award for Coq proof assistant
- Patrick Cousot, for contributions to programming languages through the co-invention of abstract interpretation, ACM SIGPLAN 2013 PL Achievement Award
- Radhia Cousot, for contributions to programming languages through the co-invention of abstract interpretation, ACM SIGPLAN 2013 PL Achievement Award
- James Cordy, known for the TXL source transformation language, a parser-based framework and functional programming language designed to support software analysis and transformation tasks
D
- Ole-Johan Dahl, the 2001 Turing Award for ideas fundamental to the emergence of OO programming, through design of the programming languages Simula I and 67
- Olivier Danvy specializes in programming languages, partial evaluation, and continuations
- John Darlington, work on program transformation and functional programming, including NPL and Hope+
- L. Peter Deutsch, first implementation of TRAC, first REPL, PhD thesis on an interactive program verifier, the 1992 ACM Software System Award for the IDE called Interlisp
- Edsger W. Dijkstra, first ALGOL 60 compiler, weakest preconditions, the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing programming languages
- Damien Doligez, co-developer and implementor of OCaml, especially its garbage collector
- Sophia Drossopoulou, formal methods for programming languages, proof of the soundness of Java
E
- Wim Ebbinkhuijsen, one of the fathers of COBOL, designed and rewrote dozens of parts of the current COBOL standard
- Alan Edelman, the 2019 Sidney Fernbach Award for... and for contributions to the Julia programming language
- Brendan Eich, designer of JavaScript
- Andrey Ershov, see Andrey Yershov
F
- Matthias Felleisen, ACM SIGPLAN 2018 PL Software Award for Racket, ACM SIGPLAN 2012 PL Achievement Award
- Jeanne Ferrante, developed the Program dependence graph, ACM SIGPLAN 2006 PL Achievement Award
- Robby Findler, thesis on linguistics of software contracts, the ACM SIGPLAN 2018 PL Software Award for Racket, design/implementation of Redex, a workbench for semantics engineers
- Keno Fischer, a core member implementing the Julia programming language,
- Matthew Flatt, ACM SIGPLAN 2018 PL Software Award for Racket
- Robert W. Floyd, the 1978 Turing Award for..., and for helping to found the following important subfields of computer science: the theory of parsing, the semantics of programming languages, automatic program verification, automatic program synthesis, and analysis of algorithms
- Robert France, the 2014 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize for his research on adding formal semantics to OO modeling notations
- Daniel P. Friedman, influential paper on lazy programming, explored macros for defining programming languages, lead author of Essentials of Programming Languages
- Yoshihiko Futamura, partial evaluation, especially Futamura projections
G
- Richard P. Gabriel, for work on Lisp, and especially Common Lisp; the 2004 ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award for innovations in programming languages and software design...
- Bernard Galler, involved in the development of computer languages, including MAD
- Erich Gamma, co-wrote the JUnit software testing framework; one of the Gang of Four, the 2006 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize, for... their book Design Patterns:..., ACM SIGPLAN 2005 PL Achievement Award
- Charles Geschke, co-author of The Design of an Optimizing Compiler, the 1989 ACM Software System Award for PostScript
- Jeremy Gibbons, generic programming and functional programming, member of IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which supports and maintains ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68
- Seymour Ginsburg, fundamental work in formal languages and abstract family of languages
- Adele Goldberg, the 1987 ACM Software System Award for Smalltalk
- Andrew Gordon, co-designer of Concurrent Haskell, co-inventor of the ambient calculus for reasoning about mobile code, designed SecPAL
- James Gosling, the 2002 ACM Software System Award for Java
- Robert Graham, co-authored two compilers, GAT for the IBM 650 and MAD
- Susan Graham, the 2009 IEEE John von Neumann Medal for "contributions to PL design and implementation...", member NAE, ACM SIGPLAN 2000 PL Achievement Award
- Cordell Green, the 1985 Grace Murray Hopper Award for establishing the theoretical basis of the field of logic programming
- Sheila Greibach, grammar theory, Greibach normal form
- David Gries, first text on writing compilers, contributions to semantics of programming language constructs, e.g. Interference freedom and
- Robert Griesemer, co-designer of Go
- Ralph Griswold, designer of SNOBOL, SL5, and Icon
- Jürg Gutknecht, co-developer of the language Oberon, developer of the language Zonnon
- John Guttag, co-developer of the Larch family of formal specification languages and the Larch Prover
- Michael Guy, co-author of ALGOL 68C
H
- Nico Habermann, co-designer of BLISS
- Robert Harper, contributions to Standard ML and the LF logical framework, ACM SIGPLAN 2021 PL Achievement Award for foundational contributions to type theory
- Eric Hehner, for predicative programming, a formal method for specification and refinement
- Anders Hejlsberg, original author of Turbo Pascal, chief architect of C#
- Laurie Hendren, continuous and significant contributions for 30+ years to the field of OO programming languages and compiling
- Thomas Henzinger, received the 2015 Milner Award for "fundamental advances in the theory and practice of formal verification and synthesis of reactive, real-time, and hybrid computer systems"
- Maurice Herlihy, 2003, 2012, and 2022 Dijkstra Prizes, one for work on transactional memory
- Rich Hickey, designer of Clojure
- Tony Hoare, first axiomatic basis for proving programs correct, CSP, the 1980 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages
- Ric Holt, the Turing programming language, contributions to Grok, Euclid, SP/k, and S/SL
- Urs Hölzle, co-implemented Strongtalk, a Smalltalk environment with optional static typing support, later became Googles first Vice President of Engineering
- Grace Hopper, co-designer of COBOL
- Jim Horning, interests included programming languages, programming methodology, specification; co-developer of the Larch approach to formal specification
- Susan B. Horwitz, noted for research on programming languages and software engineering, and in particular on program slicing and dataflow-analysis
- Paul Hudak, known for involvement in designing the language Haskell, and for several textbooks on it and computer music
- Gérard Huet, ACM SIGPLAN 2013 PL Software Award, and 2015 ACM Software System Award for Coq proof assistant
- John Hughes, PhD thesis The Design and Implementation of Programming Languages, co-developer of QuickCheck software library, 2018 ACM Fellow for contributions to software testing and functional programming
- Roger Hui, co-developed the language J
I
- Jean Ichbiah, designer the system implementation programming language called LIS, initial chief designer of Ada
- Roberto Ierusalimschy, designer of Lua
- Dan Ingalls, the 2022 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize and the 1987 ACM Software System Award for Smalltalk
- Kenneth E. Iverson, the 1979 Turing Award for his pioneering effort in... resulting in... APL, for his contributions to...,..., and programming language theory and practice
J
- Daniel Jackson, principal designer of the Alloy modelling language and its associated Alloy Analyzer analysis tool, author of the book Software Abstractions: Logic, Language, and Analysis
- Jørn Jensen, developed ALGOL 60 compilers, invented Jensen's device, which exploits call by name
- Ralph Johnson, one of the Gang of Four, the 2006 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize for... their book Design Patterns:..., ACM SIGPLAN 2005 PL Achievement Award
- Cliff Jones, the Vienna Development Method, rely-guarantee—compositional interference freedom
- Neil D. Jones, work on partial evaluation, ACM SIGPLAN 2014 PL Achievement Award
K
- Gilles Kahn, coroutines and networks of processes
- Ted Kaehler, co-implementer of Smalltalk
- Ronald Kaplan, the 1992 ACM Software System Award for the IDE called Interlisp
- Stefan Karpinski, the 2019 J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software for the co-development of the Julia programming language
- Alan Kay, the 2003 Turing Award for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary OO programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and...
- John Kelly, co-developed the pioneer dataflow language BLODI. See Dataflow programming
- John G. Kemeny, co-designer and developer the first BASIC language
- Ken Kennedy, the McDowell Award for contributions to compiler optimization and..., ACM SIGPLAN 1999 PL Achievement Award
- Brian Kernighan, co-designer of AWK and AMPL, co-author of "The C Programming Language", promoter and designer of "little languages": Eqn, Pic, Grap
- Gregor Kiczales, the 2012 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize, for his work on CLOS and the MOP and for spearheading aspect-orientation and AspectJ
- Ken Knowlton. computer graphics pioneer, created BEFLIX for making movies and L6, which introduced postfix field selection to list processing
- Donald Knuth, the 1974 Turing Award for his major contributions to... and the design of programming languages, and...
- Andrew Koenig, author of C Traps and Pitfalls and the Koenig lookup
- Michael Kölling, development of BlueJ and Greenfoot
- Kees Koster, co-designer of ALGOL 68, creator of affix grammars, creator of the original Compiler Description Language (CDL)
- Robert Kowalski, the 2011 IJCAI Award for Research Excellence for... pioneering work on... logic programming; introduced SLD resolution, which is used in the implementation of the logic programming language Prolog
- Dexter Kozen, one of the fathers of dynamic logic, an extension of modal logic capable of encoding properties of computer programs
- Shriram Krishnamurthi, developed Flapjax, ACM SIGPLAN 2018 PL Software Award for Racket, the 2012 ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award
- David Kuck, the IEEE Computer Society 2011 Computer Pioneer Award for revolutionary parallel compiler technology including Parafrase and KAP Tools
- Thomas E. Kurtz, co-designer and developer the first BASIC language
L
- Monica S. Lam, contributed to a wide range of topics including compilers and program analysis, received the ACM Most Influential PLDI Paper Award in 2001
- Leslie Lamport, creator of the formal specification language TLA+ and much more, the 2013 Turing Award
- Peter Landin used the lambda calculus to model ISWIM, in doing so defined the off-side rule and coined the term syntactic sugar; active in defining ALGOL
- Richard H. Lathwell, the 1973 Grace Murray Hopper Award for the design and implementation of APL\360
- Chris Lattner, designer of Swift, ACM SIGPLAN 2010 PL Software Award and the 2012 ACM Software System Award for LLVM, a set of compiler and toolchain technologies
- John Launchbury, lazy functional languages, contributing designer of Haskell, directed development of the domain-specific language named Cryptol
- Harold Lawson, the IEEE Computer Society 2000 Computer Pioneer Award for inventing the pointer variable and introducing this concept into PL/I
- Doug Lea, the 2010 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize, for tireless advocacy of object-oriented techniques, contributions to concurrent programming in Java, and...
- Peter Lee, PhD thesis: The automatic generation of realistic compilers from high-level semantic descriptions; as of 2022, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Research and Incubations
- Rasmus Lerdorf, father of PHP
- Xavier Leroy, the 2016 Milner Award for exceptional achievements in programming including OCaml, ACM SIGPLAN 2021 PL Software Award
- Charles H. Lindsey, co-editor of the Revised Report on Algol 68, designed an implemented ALGOL 68S, a subset of Algol 68, wrote the complete History of ALGOL 68 in
- Barbara Liskov, the 2008 Turing Award for contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design,...
- Yanhong Annie Liu, PhD thesis on incremental computation, book on systematic program design
- Peter Lucas, formal definition of PL/I, the Vienna Development Method, work on the functional programming language FL
- David Luckham, contributions to Lisp and verification of Pascal; cofounder of the Ada compiler
M
- Simon Marlow, ACM SIGPLAN 2011 PL Software Award for the Glasgow Haskell Compiler
- Larry Masinter, the 1992 ACM Software System Award for the IDE named Interlisp
- Yukihiro Matsumoto, designer of Ruby
- David May, lead designer of occam
- Conor McBride, researches type theory, functional programming; with James McKinna, cocreated Epigram (programming language); member IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi
- John McCarthy, the Lisp family of programming languages, the 1971 Turing Award
- Douglas McIlroy, pioneering researcher of macro processors and programming language extensibility, contributed to designing PL/I, SNOBOL, ALTRAN, TMG, C++
- Kathryn S. McKinley, research on compilers, runtime systems, and computer architecture, introduced the Hoard C/C++ Memory Allocator, the ACM SIGPLAN 2012 PL Software Award for Jikes RVM
- Lambert Meertens, co-designer of ABC, the incidental predecessor of Python; co-designer of the Bird–Meertens formalism; co-editor of the Revised ALGOL 68 Report
- Erik Meijer, works on functional programming, compiler implementation, parsing, and programming language design
- Bertrand Meyer, created Eiffel and advocated design by contract, awarded the 2005 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize
- Harlan Mills, the IEEE Computer Society 1994 Computer Pioneer Award for structured programming
- Robin Milner, the 1991 Turing Award for three distinct and complete achievements:...; ML, the first language to include polymorphic type inference together with a type-safe exception-handling mechanism; CCS,...
- Jayadev Misra, contributions to concurrent programming, including the languages UNITY and
- James G. Mitchell, work on the WATFOR compiler, languages Mesa and Euclid, PhD thesis on The design and construction of flexible and efficient interactive programming systems
- John C. Mitchell explored the connection between existential types and abstract data types and played a pivotal role in developing type theory as a foundation for programming languages
- Arvind Mithal, for parallel languages Id and pH, compiling on parallel machines, and language Bluespec SystemVerilog
- Calvin Mooers, the language TRAC
- Charles H. Moore, the language Forth
- Roger D. Moore, implemented ALGOL 60, the 1973 Grace Murray Hopper Award for the design and implementation APL\360
- Carroll Morgan, known proponent of the refinement calculus approach to program development; authored the book
- James H. Morris developed two underlying principles of programming languages, inter-module protection and lazy evaluation, and led the Cedar programming environment project
- Greg Morrisett, worked on type systems and proof-carrying code and provably secure systems, created Cyclone, POPL 1998 Most Influential Paper Award for applying type system ideas to low level programming
- J. Eliot B. Moss, active in the fields of garbage collection and multiprocessor synchronization, co-inventor of transactional memory
- Alan Mycroft, research in programming languages, co-created the Norcroft C compiler
- Brad A. Myers, for the Natural Programming project, focusing on programming languages programming languages and making programming easier and more correct by making it more natural.
N
- Peter Naur, the 2005 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to programming language design and the definition of ALGOL 60, to compiler design, and to...
- George Necula, POPL 1997 and 2002 Most Influential Paper Award for proof-carrying code and type-safe retrofitting of legacy code
- Bruce Nelson, the 1994 ACM Software System Award for the remote procedure call concept
- Greg Nelson, PhD thesis Techniques for Program Verification, co-designer of Modula-3, the 2013 Herbrand Award for pioneering contributions to theorem proving and program verification...
- Oscar Nierstrasz, the 2013 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize for... contributions... aimed at making systems more flexible with respect to changing requirements, based on programming languages and mechanisms supporting software evolution
- Maurice Nivat, research in formal languages and programming language semantics; received the 2002 EATCS award
- James Noble, the 2016 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize for a world-leading reputation for work on object-orientation; did pioneering work in novel type systems for programming languages
- Kristen Nygaard, the 2001 Turing Award for ideas fundamental to the emergence of OO programming, through design of Simula I and 67
O
- Martin Odersky, provided basis for javac, co-developed Generics in Java, ACM SIGPLAN 2019 PL Software Award for Scala
- Peter O'Hearn, known for separation logic, co-developed the static program analysis utility Infer Static Analyzer, 2001 Most Influential Paper Award
- John Ousterhout, the 1997 ACM Software System Award for Tcl/Tk
- Susan Owicki, contributions to semantics, e.g. Interference freedom and
P
- Krishna Palem, the 2008 McDowell Award, for pioneering contributions to the algorithmic, compilation, and architectural foundations of embedded computing
- David Park, worked on the first implementation of Lisp, an authority on the topics of fairness, program schemas and bisimulation in concurrent computing
- David Parnas, developed information hiding, an important element of OO programming today.
- Christine Paulin-Mohring, ACM SIGPLAN 2013 PL Software Award, and 2015 ACM Software System Award for Coq proof assistant
- Manfred Paul, Thesis: On the Structure of Formal Languages ; co-developer of Alcor-Illinois ALGOL 60 compiler
- Lawrence Paulson, known for the text ML for the Working Programmer and the interactive theorem prover Isabelle, which he introduced in 1986
- Steven Pemberton, co-designer of ABC, the incidental predecessor of Python; contributing author of HyperText Markup Language
- Alan Perlis, first Turing Award recipient, 1966, for... and compiler construction, ALGOL 58
- Carl Adam Petri, the IEEE Computer Society 2008 Computer Pioneer Award for Petri net theory and then parallel and distributed computing
- Simon Peyton Jones, for work in functional programming languages and lazy evaluation; codesigner of Haskell; 2011 Programming Languages Software Award for the Glasgow Haskell Compiler
- Benjamin C. Pierce, for contributions to the theory and practice of programming languages and their type systems, the author of a book on type systems titled Types and Programming Languages
- Rob Pike, co-designer of Newsqueak, Limbo, and Go
- Keshav K Pingali, 2023 Computer Society Charles Babbage Award, for contributions to high-performance compilers and graph computing
- Gordon Plotkin, for structural operational semantics and denotational semantics; the 2012 Milner Award, the ACM SIGPLAN 2010 PL Achievement Award
- Amir Pnueli, the 1996 Turing Award for seminal work introducing temporal logic into computing science and for outstanding contributions to program and systems verification
- Robin Popplestone, COWSEL, POP-2, POP-11 languages, Poplog IDE; Freddy II robot
- Cicely Popplewell, co-designer of software for Manchester Mark 1
- Vaughan Pratt, developed dynamic logic, used in formal verification of programs, and Pratt parsing, used in his syntax CGOL for Lisp
- William Pugh, co-author of the static code analysis tool FindBugs, influential in the development of the Java Memory Model
R
- George Radin, first among equals designing PL/I
- Brian Randell, in 1964, implemented the Algol 60 Whetstone compiler
- John Reif, the Proteus language and system for the development of parallel applications
- Thomas W. Reps, co-developed the early IDE the Cornell Program Synthesizer, co-founded GrammaTech, which developed CodeSonar, ACM SIGPLAN 2017 PL Achievement Award
- Mitchel Resnick, developed the visual programming language called Scratch
- John C. Reynolds, invented polymorphic lambda calculus (System F), clarified early work on continuations, introduced defunctionalization, worked on a separation logic, ACM SIGPLAN 2003 PL Achievement Award
- Martin Richards, the IEEE Computer Society 2003 Computer Pioneer Award for the design and implementation of BCPL
- Dennis Ritchie, designer of C, the 1983 Turing Award
- Douglas T. Ross, father of the programming language APT for driving numerical control, designed and implemented ALGOL X
- Guido van Rossum, designer of Python
- Barbara G. Ryder, extensive work on Java and Javascript, e.g.
S
- Klaus Samelson, pioneer in compilers for programming languages and push-pop stack algorithms, Algol 60 Committee, see also
- Jean Sammet, developed FORMAC, one of the developers of COBOL
- Carl Sassenrath, designer and implementor of Rebol
- Fred B. Schneider, defined liveness, contributions to assertional methods for developing concurrent and distributed programs
- Jacob T. Schwartz, designer of SETL and Artspeak
- Ilya Sergey, for the language Scilla and work on
- Ravi Sethi, best known as co-author of the Dragon Book, 1996 ACM Fellow for contributions to compiler technology, programming languages,...
- Viral B. Shah, the 2019 J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software for the co-development of the language Julia
- Brian Cantwell Smith, introduced the notion of reflective programming in programming languages
- David Canfield Smith, co-developer of the visual programming language named Stagecast Creator based on the concept of programming by example
- Mary Lou Soffa, research on compilers and program optimization and more, 2012 Ken Kennedy Award
- Richard Stallman, the 2015 ACM Software System Award for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)
- Guy L. Steele, Jr., co-designer of Scheme and designer of Fortress, ACM SIGPLAN 1997 PL Achievement Award
- Alexander Stepanov, advocate of generic programming, main designer and implementer of the C++ Standard Template Library
- Christopher Strachey, co-designer of CPL (programming language), father of Denotational semantics
- Bjarne Stroustrup, the 2015 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize for the design, implementation, and evolution of C++ and IEEE Computer Society 2018 Computer Pioneer Award
- Gerald Jay Sussman, co-designer of Scheme
- Bert Sutherland, developed a two-dimensional programming language for manipulating graphical data, participated in the development of Smalltalk and Java
- Don Syme, creator of F#
T
- Tim Teitelbaum, co-developed the early IDE the Cornell Program Synthesizer, co-founded GrammaTech, which developed CodeSonar, which performs static analysis on C, C++, C#, and Java
- Warren Teitelman, for BBN LISP, the 1992 ACM Software System Award for the IDE named Interlisp
- Ken Thompson, designer of B, co-designer of Go, Turing Award 1983
- Simon Thompson, functional programming research, textbooks; designs Cardano domain-specific languages: Marlowe
- Mads Tofte, co-author of the Definition of Standard ML, region inference, POPL 1994 Most Influential Paper Award
- Emina Torlak, received the 2021 ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award for leading work in automated verification
- Alan Turing, for the Turing machine; his work is so important that the Turing Award, the "Nobel Prize of Computing," bears his name.
- David A. Turner, designed and implemented SASL, KRC, and Miranda, member of IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi
U
- Jeffrey Ullman, the 2020 Turing Award for fundamental algorithms and theory underlying programming language implementation and for synthesizing these results, highly influential books.
- David Ungar, the 2009 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize, his work on Self has had a profound effect on the field by introducing the advanced adaptive compiling technology that made the widespread industrial use of Java possible
V
- Martin Vechev, developed Silq, the first high-level PL for quantum computing with a strong static type system, the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award
- John Vlissides, one of the Gang of Four, the 2006 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize, for... their book Design Patterns:..., ACM SIGPLAN 2005 PL Achievement Award
- Victor A. Vyssotsky, co-developed the pioneer dataflow language BLODI. See Dataflow programming
W
- Eiiti Wada, member of a team that designed ALGOL N as a proposed successor to ALGOL 60, but it was not chosen for what became ALGOL 68; he later became a member of IFIP Working Group 2.1
- Philip Wadler, co-designer of Haskell, involved in adding generic types to Java 5.0, POPL 1993 Most Influential Paper Award
- Larry Wall, designer of Perl
- Mitchell Wand works on semantics of programming languages, co-author of Essentials of Programming Languages
- John Warnock, the 1989 ACM Software System Award for PostScript
- David Warren, wrote the first compiler for Prolog, designed the Warren Abstract Machine, the de facto standard target for Prolog compilers
- Mark Wegman, co-invented the static single-assignment form, the ACM SIGPLAN 2006 PL Achievement Award
- Peter Wegner, seminal work with Cardelli in OO programming: On Understanding Types
- Peter J. Weinberger, contributed to the AWK programming language and the Fortran compiler f77
- Stephanie Weirich work on type inference has been incorporated into the Glasgow Haskell Compiler; the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award
- David J. Wheeler, the IEEE Computer Society 1985 Computer Pioneer Award for assembly language programming
- Jennifer Widom, for her PhD thesis on trace-based network proof systems
- Adriaan van Wijngaarden, a designer of ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68, developed the two-level Van Wijngaarden grammar, expounded continuations
- Jeannette Wing, early work included A behavioral notion of subtyping, influential in the field as Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research and later as Columbia University executive vice president for research
- Niklaus Wirth, the 1984 Turing Award for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages, Euler, ALGOL W, Pascal, Modula, and Oberon
- Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Language
- Mike Woodger, influential in the design of software and languages, including ALGOL 60 and Ada
- Philip Woodward, designed CORAL 66; his computer team developed the first implementation of ALGOL 68, ALGOL 68-R
- William Wulf, co-designer of BLISS, wrote an optimizing compiler for it, co-founded the compiler technology company Tartan, Inc.
Y
- Katherine Yelick, known for her work in partitioned global address space languages, including co-inventing Unified Parallel C
- Andrey Yershov, theory, design, and implementation of programming languages, partial evaluation
- Nobuo Yoneda, member of a team that designed ALGOL N as a proposed successor to ALGOL 60, but it was not chosen for what became ALGOL 68; a member of IFIP Working Group 2.1
- Akinori Yonezawa, the 2008 AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize for "his overall contribution to both theory and practice of concurrent OO languages...", designer ABCL/R, a reflective subset of the first concurrent OO programming language ABCL/1
Z
- Marvin Zelkowitz, PL features to aid in program development and debugging, tests for runtime correctness of executable code
- Heinz Zemanek, managed the IBM Laboratory Vienna, was crucial in its developing a formal definition of PL/I
- Jaap A. Zonneveld, he and Edsger W. Dijkstra wrote the first ALGOL 60 compiler