(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.

Bill Gates (Age: 57)

Now many people may be upset with this choice and say that he was a businessman. True, he was a businessman. But he was also a Software Engineer. He was a programmer (1, 2) and then a project manager, if you will, for MS-DOS; one of the most used operating systems ever.  He was also the Chief Architect of Microsoft for a very long time when some of the most used programming languages (e.g. Visual Basic, C#) and products (e.g. Windows) were produced.