Leslie Lamport. There are a dozen larger than life programmers out there, but reading his biography I was struck with a kind of resigned sorrow at the concrete expression of a certain ideal life that I always wanted for myself and know I&#x27;ll never achieve. BS from MIT at an absurd age, math PhD, goes on to write TLA+ which is a marvel of sophistication. Turing Award.<p>The king kind of has to be Dennis Ritchie in my mind, I can&#x27;t think of code that&#x27;s more influential in general and definitely in my life than C and Unix.<p>I like Rich Hickey a lot, what he&#x27;s done and judging from his talks his personality.<p>More obscure but this guy Fabrice Bellard is an animal, he puts out this insane amount of sophisticated code like, oh btw guys here&#x27;s a fully working LTE stack.