List of programming language researchers

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