Randoom a Michael Friis production

Famous Danish Programmers

Denmark somehow seems to have hatched more programmers and language designers of note than one would expect of a country of 6 million. Since almost none of them live in Denmark, it is kind of easy to forget. Here’s a partial list (alphabetical, inclusion determined by my completely whimsical notions of famousness, reasons for inclusion may be somewhat exaggerated):

• Anders Hejlsberg (came up with Turbo Pascal, lead architect for C#)
• Bjarne Stoustrup (came up with C++)
• David Heinemeier Hansson (created Ruby on Rails)
• Lars and Jens Rasmussen (came up with Google Maps and Google Wave)
• Lars Bak (created V8 Javascript VM for Google Chrome)
• Peter Naur (Turing Award winner, contributed to ALGOL 60)
• Rasmus Lerdorf (created PHP, born on/in Greenland)

Janus Friis is missing

@evilops I agree Janus is a very significant Danish IT-personality, but he’s not much of a programmer (as far as I’m informed, at least).

If you asked Poul Henning Kamp, he would probably say he should be on the list! Great people you’ve listed.