Top 10 Living Software Engineers in the World Today

This is my humble opinion.  Please leave feedback!  I know there are probably people out there I should have included.

(All ages are as of 2013)

1. Steve McConnell – He wrote the bible, Code Complete.  Enough said. (Age:50)
2. Linus Torvalds – He wrote and is the architect for one of the most used operating systems ever, Linux.  Oh, he did Git also. (Age: 43)
3. Kent Beck – TDD, Agile Manifesto Signatory, jUnit, XP. (Age: 52)
4. Barry Boehm – Software Economics, COCOMO, Spiral Development (Age: 78)
5. David Parnas – Invented Information hiding and de-coupling. (Age: 72)
6. Grady Booch – Helped invent UML and RUP.  Seminal person in Software Architecture. (Age: 58)
7. Martin Fowler – Agile Manifesto Signatory, Refactoring, and wrote the classic Patterns of Enterprise ApplicationArchitecture. (Age: 50)
8. Tim Berners-Lee – Invented the WWW for heaven’s sake. (Age: 57)
9. Fred Brooks – Wrote THE classic, Mythical Man-Month and also a Turing award (Nobel Prize of Computing) winner. (Age: 81)

So, you’ll probably notice the list only has nine people (if you read this far).  I’ve included the best for last because he is also the most controversial.