TITLE: Radical Code
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 30, 2008  4:35 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
I received an interesting request in e-mail today.  I was
asked to identify a few...

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
software innovators--people who have challenged, disrupted,
and redefined disciplines through radical code.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

The request is specifically for programmers, thinkers,
and writers who revolutionized my field, computer science.
The first people who come to mind, of course, are John
McCarthy and Alan Kay.  McCarthy may not himself have
written code for the first Lisp interpreter back in 1958,
but
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog-images/code/lisp1.5-page13.jpg">
   this page</A>
certainly
<A HREF="http://bc.tech.coop/blog/080101.html">
   revolutionized computing</A>.
I know that Kay didn't write all of Smalltalk, even at the
beginning (Dan Ingalls is responsible for most or all of
the VM), but the ideas in Smalltalk certainly changed
how I and many other people think about programming.  So
they are at the top of my list.

Why limit my response to the products of my timy brain?
I am interested in hearing whom <STRONG>you</STRONG> think
changed computing with "radical code".  Don't limit yourself
to CS, either.  I'd love to hear about people who changed
other disciplines with their code.  Drop me a
<A HREF="mailto:wallingf@cs.uni.edu">
   message</A>
with your ideas!
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