The Programmer Dress Code

When a programmer dresses anyhow, don't complain . Check this out.
I really want to know what it is about programming, or computers in general, that makes people want to grow a beard, have long hair, and dress like a slob. I can say these things without guilt because while I do not have long hair, I do have a beard and I do in fact dress like a slob. Not horribly sloppy or anything. I am actually pretty fanatical about hygiene, I just am not big on tucking my shirt in or ironing it or shaving. So who was the guy that started the unkempt programmer code of honor?
Was it this guy?
Edsger Dijkstra
Edsger Dijkstra (most know for Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm) Here we see him in a suit and tie, but hey, he was born in 1930. All people wore a suit and tie back then, even women and children.
Or how about this guy?
Alan_Kay
Alan Kay – Doesn’t he look like a sad Burt Reynolds? Stop laughing! This is one of the fathers of object oriented programming. All hail! He does have the mop and a nice ‘stache going on though.
What about this one?
Bjarne Stroustrup
Bjarne Stroustrup – I would say that this looks like the kind of guy I would expect to see on a "wanted poster" somewhere, but this guy brought us C++! I couldn’t talk trash about a guy who made C++.
And this one?
Charles W. Bachman
Charles Bachman – Nothing unkempt about this guy, except that hat! Damn son! He had a hand in early database technology and won the Turing award for his work.
The list keeps going…
 KenAndDennis
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson – Are we programming here or going to a Hell’s Angels meeting? But seriously though, being that I am a Microsoft programmer I’m not sure that I am supposed to like these guys. Dennis was the original developer of C and one of the core developers on UNIX while Ken was the man responsible for UNIX and the fact that I don’t have to pay 8000 dollars for a copy of Windows since MS has some competition now. But seriously, these guys are gods.
One of my personal favorites…
 John McCarthy
John McCarthy – Long lost relative of Colonel Sanders and the original designer of the Lisp programming language. This guy had some serious programming cojones. He even predicted in 1961 that one day computer processing would be sold like a utility. That is the kind of prediction that makes Nostradamus look like a sissy. Again, not too terribly unkempt, but that crazy hair and beard mixed with the suit says "serious by day, party animal by night."
The A-list celeb:
knuth_don
Donald Knuth – If I have to explain what this guy did for computer science, then you need to stop reading this and go to the book store. Again, not an unkempt guy, but nothing says "Computer Programming God" like flannel. You really have to wonder where his beard or mustache is though. He is a real computer scientist, isn’t he?
Cha-ching…
Martin Fowler
Martin Fowler – I’m not sure he should be in the list with some of these other guys, but he is a personal hero of mine, and man this picture is great. I could not have asked for a better example of this article if I had requested a picture from him. He has written quite a few books, of which Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture are my favorites.
And the freedom fighter…
Richard_Stallman
Richard Stallman – Like him or hate him, he is a seriously influential person in the computer world, and again he looks like he’d fit in better at a wood chopping competition than at MIT, but who am I to judge? The man is the founder of GNU, need I say more?
And the fruit…
 Steve_Wozniak
Steve Wozniak – What is a list of crazy computer people without Woz? He co-founded Apple (duh) and is the poster-boy for hippie style programming.
This one is a gem…
 Yukihiro Matsumoto
Yukihiro Matsumoto – I just threw this one in for the search engines. Just kidding! This the man that brought us Ruby and proves that even in the land of the rising sun, programmers still need beards. Or at least a five o’clock shadow.
By popular demand…
Larry_Wall
Larry Wall – This guy brought us Perl and sports a nice mustache and hair that would make Fabio jealous.
And I can’t believe I left off this one…
Alan_Cox
Alan Cox – Holy crap. Alan Cox and Richard Stallman must have been long lost brothers. This guy was one of the earliest developers on the linux kernel and apparently has not shaved since he started.
The programming santa…
James Gosling
James Gosling – This guy brought us Java and is wearing a shirt with the java mascot playing an electric guitar. I have nothing else to say. I think I am out of smart-ass comments.
He’s a cold hearted snake…
Guido van Rossum
Guido Van Rossum – This guy brought us Python and he is seen here without his beard, but he has an afro that would make Snoop Dog smile.
I know I said Fabio before, but wow…
Grady Booch
Grady Booch – This guy does commercials for Herbal Essences shampoo and in his spare time he invented UML. Oh, and he wrote a little book called Object Oriented Analysis and Design, you may have heard of it. :-)
And saving the best for last…
DSC_0063
Justin Etheredge – How’d that tool get in there? His picture doesn’t deserve to be in the same folder as these guys, much less in a list with them! Bah!
So there you have it, my totally incomplete list of bearded, long haired, casually dressed visionaries. Except that last one. Sorry, but I’m not sure how that last one got in there. Now what other field (except maybe physics) would accept these people, much less make them their idols. Got any other great pictures of any computer scientists/software engineers? Let us know in the comments.
Also, this list is clearly in jest, if you are offended by having your picture on here then please let me know and I will take it down. Just send the request in writing to me with a signed copy of your book/source/picture and a personal letter of recommendation. I will then dance because you have fallen victim to my trap.
And one final note, I can’t believe you guys read this crap. :-) All this technology and what do we use it for? To make fun of the visionaries of our time. Man I love these here internets.



What started out as a joke turned into a huge success! So many awesome computer scientists and so little space! I started adding a few to the end of the last post, but when I realized how many more there were that needed to be added on, well, I decided to come back with more. This list is going to include a few less known people, a few that are famous (or infamous), and even a few that don’t have a Y chromosome. The last 4 or 5 in the previous post were newly added, so go check those out if you saw the list before it changed!
In this post I tried to add a huge number of people that were suggested, but remember, they had to have a big beard, long hair, or in some other way look pretty gnarled. I gave a bit of leeway to the females, since they are genetically limited with respect to the whole facial hair thing. This list is also quite a bit longer than last time, so lets hope you can hold in there! Oh, and if anyone is curious, the last post has had just over 100,000 views and has eaten through about 80GB of bandwidth. This post is quite a bit larger and so I have moved all of the images over to Amazon S3. Let’s see how that goes. Okay, enough blabbing, lets get this party started!

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR…


"Maddog" Jon Hall – If you thought James Gosling had a bit of a "Santa" look to him, then you’ll think that Jon Hall is Santa’s long lost love-child. This grizzly lookin’ dude is the Executive Director of Linux International, which is a non-profit that supports and promotes Linux. He was also the guy at DEC who got the hardware for Linus Torvalds to accomplish his first DEC Alpha port of linux. He also wrote the book Linux for Dummies.

The fantastic three…


Adi Shamir, Ronald Rivest und Leonard Adleman – Is it just me, or does Adi Shamir look like a young David Cross? Don’t believe me? Just imagine more hair and a more full beard. Man that is creepy!

I don’t know why that creeps me out. Anyways, these three dapper fellows are the inventors of RSA cryptography. Ever wonder where RSA came from? Yep, it is their last names (family name).

The computer trickster…


Manuel Blum – When he wasn’t busy impersonating Tony Montana with his stylish white suits, he was doing groundbreaking work in Cryptography and much more recently was one of the people that coined the term CAPTCHA.

The Hawkeye…

 

 
Barbara Liskov – In her later years she lost the stylish eyewear, and therefore I had to use an earlier photo. If you think that her Harry Potter spectacles are amazing, just wait until you hear that she was the first woman to receive a computer science PHD. Oh, and she helped develop the first language with data abstractions. And the first distributed language. And she rocked the house.

Crazy Bob Saget


Robin Milner – Not that Bob Saget isn’t crazy, but this guy looks like he wants to eat your children. But only in this picture…I think. Beyond nibbling on little ones, he also developed the language ML which was the first language with type inference and influenced many functional languages that have come after it, notably Haskell. It also has several dialects in use today including OCaml and the recently released F#.

Speaking of the Yetti, errr, I mean Haskell…


Grizzly Adams (aka Philip Wadler) – Man, we have so many look-a-likes in this list! Good thing this isn’t one of them. Cause I swear this guy is Grizzly Adams. Check it out…

I had to draw on the glass in order to really give the full effect. Otherwise it would be like the Clark Kent/Superman effect and you wouldn’t see the resemblance. Plus I think it just adds a little something extra, don’t you? Well, enough about his manly beard, this bear wrestler developed Haskell and more recently XQuery. So while he may be a wild man, he seems to have tamed his computer.

No woman, no cry…


Jaron Lanier – This guy goined the term Virtual Reality. Hmmm…I wonder what kind of reality he might have been in when he coined it. It doesn’t matter I guess because he founded VPL Research and led the teams that developed some of the first multi-person virtual worlds that used head mounted displays! Oh, and to back up my earlier point, during college he was a "goat milk and cheese provider." Can you say hippie?

The rising Sun…


Bill Joy – When not tending to his Oompa Loompas he was busy working on BSD. He then co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, and as they say, the rest is history.

Richie Rich

Bill Gates
Bill Gates – While his glasses and hair have gotten smaller, his wallet has become much larger. Here we see Bill in all of his Hunter S. Thompson glory after he was arrested for speeding and driving without a license. He founded a little company called Microsoft, which has many people wanting to see a grown up version of this picture.

The programming language pimp daddy…

Niklaus Wirth
Niklaus Wirth – This guy designed Euler, Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon. His programming seed was spread to almost every language that you now know of. His seminal book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs inspired many computer scientists and is still used at many universities. So remember that face, there will be a quiz later.

Another one of them UNIX guys…


Brian Kernighan – Those UNIX guys love them some beards, don’t they? This guy was at Bell Labs with Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (as seen in the last post) and contributed greatly to UNIX. He is also the "K" in AWK. Brian was also responsible for the name Unics, which was eventually shortened to UNIX. He also wrote the book  on C programming, literally.

And from the "OH MY GOD LOOK AT THOSE GLASSES" department…


Dorothy Denning – Geez, the 70′s sure did have some awesome eyewear. Where can I get some octagonal glasses these days? Nowhere, for shame. And that ring is also quite a statement. And did I mention the shirt? Nothing about this woman says "world renowned cryptographic expert" but that is exactly what she is. In fact, she was so respected in her field that she was one of the people that the NSA called in to review the Skipjack blog cipher. She has written several books, her most recent of which was Information Warfare and Security.

The knight of sorting…

C.A.R. Hoare
C.A.R. Hoare – This guy developed the Quicksort, which was originally called the Hoaresort, and while it is still the most awesome sorting algorithm ever developed it would have been even more awesome if I could tell non-technical people that I was "Hoare Sorting" something. They would instantly think that my job was way more interesting than it is. We would probably also have a lot more Computer Science majors if one of the classes involved learning how to "Hoaresort". He is also the source of the quote "premature optimization is the root of all evil."

Help me Obi-Wan…


Ada Lovelace – The first stand-in for Princess Leia…

See the similarities? Again, a little eerie. Well, they were both royalty after all. Ada Lovelace is widely considered to be the first programmer, since she wrote up a description of Charles Babbage’s machine, the analytical engine, and then wrote a program for it to calculate Bernoulli numbers. She is also the inspiration for the programming language Ada which was used extensively by the U.S. DOD (Department of Defense) for many years.

Tarzan of the Apes…


Robert Tarjan – For some reason when I see Tarjan, I want to say "Tarzan". The irony here is that Tarzan was cleaner shaven than Robert Tarjan. The main difference is that while Tarzan was a chump, our friend Robert was a world renowned computer scientist who invented several graph algorithms and co-invented splay trees and Fibonacci heaps.

The chatty Cathy…


Jarkko Oikarinen – Again, sorry about the look-a-likes, but just try to tell me that this guy doesn’t look like Andy Richter.

Separated at birth? I’ll let you decide. Jarkko developed IRC which became the first open internet chat program. So next time someone interrupts your work with a "what you up to?" IM, just look to the sky and yell "Jarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrkoooooooooooooooooo"!

Spreadsheet aficionado…


Dan Bricklin – There is just something about this guy’s outfit…I can’t put my finger on it. Nooooooo…wait….I see it! That yellow shirt peekin’ out. He is totally a super hero. He runs into a phone booth, and bam, he comes running back out in a bright yellow suit with a big old calculator. Why a calculator you ask? Well, this guy wrote VisiCalc, the first commercially available spreadsheet application. Which was then promptly crushed by several other companies, but it could be said that he was responsible for the start of a huge push of PC’s into the workplace.

The compressor…


Phil Katz – This guy is the inventor of the truly terrible computer person photo. I mean seriously, he looks like he is waiting for someone to start a stopwatch so that he can begin eating his stack of floppy disks. And he doesn’t look too happy about it. But he also invented the zip file format and was the author of PKZip. Ever wonder where that PK came from? Well, now you know.

Someone please comment on this guy…


Jon Postel – Although he looked like he should be running moonshine and trying to avoid the po-po, he was actually the editor of the RFC (Request For Comment) document series. Yep, that RFC document series. The one that pretty much makes up all the standards on the internet. Without him there might not be any tubes and Senator Ted Stevens would probably have a little bit of self respect left.
Well, this is the conclusion of my second (and final) entry on this topic. Not that I don’t like beards and programmers, but these posts are way too much work. :-)



Source :  http://www.codethinked.com/the-programmer-dress-code