When a programmer dies, I feel kind of different than someone else has died, it is complicated to explain but when you are a programmer you might understand that.

(10/24/2011): We are having a sad month. John McCarthy, inventor of Lisp & garbage collection, father of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Turing Award recipient has passed away. What a great life full of contributions to the world and starting a new era in computer science.

(old (programmers (never die) (they just (get one extra closing-paranthesis)))) (10/13/2011): We have just Dennis Ritchie (dms), creator of C language and developer of Unix and Turing Award recipient. His contribution to programming world was unarguably quite a lot. Very sorry to hear that. My condolences to his family and friends. old programmers never die, they just cast into void. (7/25/2011) Today we all heard loss of Steve Lacey, a Google employee (formerly, Microsoft employee) after a car accident in Kirkland (very near to me). Steve worked in Flight Simulator which is really one of my favorite video games. Our thoughts are with his wife and 7 year old boy and 5 year old girl. old software engineers never die, they just logout. One month ago, we lost Robert Morris, another programming wizard and computer security pioneer worked on UNIX has passed away. Imagine now all Linux, Android, iOS, Mac OS devices are derived from UNIX. Such a great story of his life. old unix programmers never die, they just mv-ed to /dev/null When you go back a few years, in 2007, the father of database transactions processing and Turing Award receipent Jim Gray lost at sea after sailing with his boat. Before his loss, he worked on Microsoft Virtual Earth, and more importantly he was a pioneer in TerraServer (and WorldWide Telescope) which is a database for aerial world maps. After his disappearance, Microsoft, Google and Amazon collaborated to find him – and guess what*, using WorldWide Telescope maps he had developed.

old programmers never die, they are just lost pointers. A few years before that, we lost E.W. Dijkstra a famous computer scientist and Turing Award receipent scientist in 2002. He invented shortest path algorithm that is used in many disciplines and semaphores that is fundamental of multithreaded programming. old computer scientists never die, they just recurse. Exactly today (7/25) in 2008, we lost Randy Pausch a CS professor at CMU. Most of you know him his The Last Lecture video before he passes away of pancreatic cancer. He was one of key people of Alice that young people can learn programming.

Last year, in 2010, Watts Humphrey, “father of software quality” has passed away. (Thanks to Paul)

In 2003, Edgar F. Codd  inventor of “relational databases” and BCNF (Boyce-Codd Normal Form) passed away. (Thanks to Dragos)

I prepared this article to make a tribute to all those great people. They made the world a better place. Do not forget them.

Rest in peace. :-|