In real life

WWOSD

—seen on a t-shirt in a North-American campus

Computer Scientists

• William Burge (loop fusion)
• Edsger W. Dijkstra (astronomy and telescopes (allegedly), program testing, recursion modeled with a stack)
• Philip Dreyfus (informatique)
• Dave du Feu (powerset)
• Michael Gordon (powerset)
• Donald E. Knuth (early optimization)
• Peter J. Landin (loop fusion)
• David B. MacQueen (ML as a domain-specific language)
• Robin Milner (cannot go wrong, purism)
• Peter Naur (datalogi, data science)
• Chris Okasaki (functional queues)
• Alan Perlis (every word can be verbed, building everything top-down, a stark data structure, ten parameters, beware of the Turing tar-pit, low-level programming language)
• Olin Shivers (what would he do)
• Brian C. Smith (reflective towers)
• Karl Steinbuch (informatik)
• Christopher Strachey (love letters, currying and uncurrying)
• Carolyn L. Talcott (transducers)
• Ken Thompson (grep)
• Philip Wadler (listlessness)

Before Computer Science

• Aristotle (four causes)
• Haskell Curry (Haskell, currying and uncurrying)
• René Descartes (therefore, Cartesian product)
• Gottfried Leibniz (calculemus)
• Giuseppe Peano (numerals)
• Plato (platonism)
• Bertrand Russell (induction step)
• Zeno of Elea (the half of it)

Outside Computer Science

• Isaac Asimov (that’s funny)
• Cyrano de Bergerac (and Pinocchio)
• Nicolas Boileau (clarity)
• Coco Chanel (fashion)
• Umberto Eco (semiotics)
• Sigmund Freud (sometimes)
• Carl-Friedrich Gauss (notions and notations)
• Piet Hein (Things Take Time)
• Robert A. Heinlein (predestination)
• Émile Henriot (la culture)
• Søren Kierkegaard (forward and backward)
• Jacques Derrida (nothing outside context)
• Paul Lockhart (notions and notations)
• René Magritte (not a pipe)
• Barack Obama (yes you can)
• George Orwell (equality is relative)
• Calvin Russell (only the characters)
• Peter Schickele (quite a crowd)
• George Bernard Shaw (experience)
• Robert Louis Stevenson (parrot)
• Mae West (too much of a good thing)
• Walter Jon Williams (not a game)
• Bill Withers (I know I know I know)

Version

Updated [06 Apr 2020]

Updated [21 Feb 2020]

Updated [15 Feb 2020]

Updated [19 Jan 2020]