Having programmed for several years, I am awed at how much the people on this list have contributed to programming and computer science!
http://www.ranker.com/list/most-influential-software-programmers-of-all-time/arun,
Ada Lovelace
Bjarne Stroustrup
C++
Dennis Ritchie
C
Donald Knuth
Algorithms
Doug Cutting
Solr, Hadoop, Lucene, Nutch
Guido van Rossum
Python
James Gosling
Java
Larry Wall
Perl
Linus Torvalds
Linux
Michael Widenius
MySQL