My favorite programmers (not necessarily in order of preference as all of them are legends)
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie & Brian Kernighan - Creators of C & Unix still working efficiently in one form or another on wide range of devices in the form of Linux
James Gosling father of Java and wrote a version emacs called gosmacs. Go figure. Still developing and writes a blog at http://nighthacks.com/jag
Bill Joy - one of the founder of Sun Micro Systems and early hacker on BSD Unix - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy
Linus Torvalds - Creator of Linux Kernel - https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/
Richard Stallman - GNU founder - https://www.stallman.org/
Eric S Raymond - http://www.catb.org/~esr
Brian Behlendorf - one of the creators of Apache
Paul Graham - http://www.paulgraham.com/index.html - Author of Hackers and Painters and one of the people behind Hacker News and https://www.ycombinator.com/
Joel Spolsky - Guy who wrote the early spec for Microsoft Excel one of the most successful business application for decades and built and building wonderful products still - Trello and StackExchange are few to mention. More details at http://joelonsoftware.com/
Google’s Jeff Dean - slate.com/articles/technology/doers/2013/01/jeff_…