Today we are connected to the Internet all the time and we connect with people on social medias, we do our shopping online and some of us even run out entire business online. This is possible due to influential programmers who have made it possible by programming tools which is widely used today in the online industry. Read this top 5 list of influential programmers that helped form the Internet as we know it today.

1. Linus Torvalds

Linus Torvalds invented Linux, the free operating system, while sitting in his dorm room at the University of Helsinki. What started off as a hobby has become the operating system of choice for data centers, supercomputers, and server farms worldwide. Linus is now a mogul of the operating system world, with his Linux system used around the world from personal computers to major corporations. Most of the webpages that you visit are hosted on servers with Linux based operating systems like.

• Debian
• Ubuntu
• CentOS

The Linux kernel has been used for other operating systems, such as GNU, and has in recent times become known as Android and Chrome OS systems. The scope of the Linux world is vast, with many home operating systems working from the Linux kernel that Linus developed, making him one of the most influential programmers in the world.

Linus is also very well known for not playing nicely with others. He has publicly rebuffed questions that he has thought are trivial and seems to not care if people like him personally or not. Though this has put off some in the Linux community, the power of his operating system is such that it will be a favorite with or without Linus’ antics.

2. Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the only one in this list that has been honored with a knighthood from the Queen for his work in technology. Berners-Lee is the creator of hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), or the thing that the whole internet is based on, in 1989. Without his influence we wouldn’t have been able to make the Internet as widely used as it is today.

Berners-Lee is also the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), which oversees the development of the internet worldwide, as well as being a director for the Wed Science Research Initiative, the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and a senior research and holder of the Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

More recently, Berners-Lee has been advocating for a not-for-profit organisation, called the Alliance of Affordable Internet, to get internet access more affordable for everyone in the world. His mission is backed by the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.

 3. Brendan Eich

Brendan Eich is the creator of the JavaScript programming language, the de facto system for web app development. He was also, until recently, the CEO of Mozilla, the company that runs the Firefox web browser. Eich started his career at Silicon Graphics, working on network code and operating systems. In 1995 he started work at Netscape Communications Corporation and was commissioned to create a programming language.

This initial project was called Mocha, before it was renamed to LiveScript, and then again to JaveScript. Which has influenced the way we can interact with web content, and today almost all website uses Javascript in one way or another. In 1998, Eich co-founded the Mozilla project and worked there as the chief technical officer until he was promoted to chief executive officer in 2014.

Unfortunately for him, in the same year he was implicated in a scandal after giving a personal donation to a campaign that was seeking ban gay marriage. Eich stepped down from CEO the same year that he was appointed.

4. Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg is the famous co-inventor of Facebook, the social networking platform, which he created in his dorm room at Harvard. Zuckerberg is still heavily involved in driving the development of Facebook, as chairman and CEO, and in advocating universal connectivity in general. Since the age of 23, Facebook has made Zuckerberg a billionaire.

Facebooks influence has made social media marketing possible due to the fact that so many members around the world can share content and rapidly spread world wide. Influential programmers like Zuckerberg make game changes to the industry. Like how Facebooks need for a more powerful and faster PHP pre-processor released the open source project HHVM which is being adopted by many.

Since 2010, Time magazine has rated Zuckerberg as one of the 100 wealthiest and influential people on the planet, as well as awarding him a prestigious Person of the Year. He is also rated as one of the most Influential Jews in the World by the Jerusalem Post, and has a movie, The Social Network, dedicated to the development and rise of Facebook.

5. Jeffrey Way

Jeffery Way have been the editor of the popular web development blog, Nettuts+, as well as being the developer evangelist for Envato marketplaces like ThemeForest. Nettuts+ is a free, online tutorial for those wanting to learn code and design for the web, and you can also pay a small subscription fee and get premium tutorials and eBooks every month. Way is an engaging speaker who takes users through easy to follow tutorials about coding, design, and various other forms of web development. His engaging style has been snapped up by Evanto to use as their ‘pitching’ man for new ideas and sales.

One of his current and very popular platform is Laracasts where he frequently upload new videos and tutorials on how to use the php framework Laravel and other popular web development tools every programmer need in his arsenal. This platform is described as Netflix for Developers, and the motto of this project is never stop learning.

A keen learner and an avid vegetarian, Way loves the challenge of having to stay at the forefront of what is happening in the coding and developing world. His passion for what he loves is contagious and he has made a name for himself by teaching coding in a way that is accessible and understandable to all.

Influential Programmers

This is just a short list of interesting people who have influenced the Internet and there are so many more people that deserve their very own article. This list of top 5 influential programmers is a good start, but there are too many to cover in one article. The people on this list is programming in a wide variatie of languages, from C to PHP, and people often forget how important they are for the technology to move forward.

Which programmers do you think is important in the past or the present – and why, please post a comment or send me a Tweet!