In real life

WWOSD

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

Computer Scientists

• Dines Bjørner (looping twice in a row)
• 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 J. C. Gordon (powerset)
• Hanne Gottliebsen (spinoff)
• Neil D. Jones (computable functions)
• Donald E. Knuth (early optimization)
• Peter J. Landin (syntactic sugar, loop fusion, mechanical evaluation)
• David B. MacQueen (ML as a domain-specific language)
• John McCarthy (a good idea at the time)
• 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, special case of something more general, constants and variables, a stark data structure, ten parameters, beware of the Turing tar-pit, low-level programming language)
• Olin Shivers (what would he do, mine too)
• Brian C. Smith (reflective towers)
• Karl Steinbuch (informatik)
• Christopher Strachey (love letters, currying and uncurrying, generalized Cartesian product)
• Carolyn L. Talcott (transducers)
• Ken Thompson (grep)
• Alan Turing (the mathematical possibilities)
• Philip Wadler (listlessness)

Before Computer Science

• Aristotle (four causes)
• Haskell Curry (currying and uncurrying)
• René Descartes (therefore)
• Stephen Cole Kleene (S-m-n function, S-m-n theorem)
• Gottfried Leibniz (calculemus)
• Giuseppe Peano (numerals)
• Plato (platonism)
• Bertrand Russell (induction step)
• Zeno of Elea (the half of it)

Outside Computer Science

• Douglas Adams (the answer)
• Isaac Asimov (that’s funny)
• Cyrano de Bergerac (and Pinocchio)
• Nicolas Boileau (clarity)
• Mel Brooks (stand-up philosopher)
• Coco Chanel (fashion)
• Pierre Dac (water pudding)
• Umberto Eco (the name of a rose, semiotics of stack overflows, the infinity of lists)
• Gad Elmaleh (Brian is in the kitchen)
• Richard Feynman (some significance)
• Sigmund Freud (sometimes)
• Carl-Friedrich Gauss (notions and notations)
• Piet Hein (Things Take Time)
• Robert A. Heinlein (predestination)
• Émile Henriot (la culture)
• Grace Jones (strange)
• Richard M. Jones (trouble with streams)
• Søren Kierkegaard (forward and backward)
• Paul Lockhart (notions and notations)
• René Magritte (not a pipe)
• Queen Margrethe II of Denmark (Danish and French)
• Groucho Marx (joining a club)
• H. L. Mencken (The American Language)
• Barack Obama (yes you can)
• George Orwell (equality is relative)
• Edgar Allan Poe (a string within a string)
• Calvin Russell (only the characters)
• William Shakespeare (the question)
• Peter Schickele (quite a crowd)
• George Bernard Shaw (experience)
• Robert Louis Stevenson (parrot)
• Steven Strogatz (the Joy of x)
• Mae West (too much of a good thing)
• Walter Jon Williams (not a game)
• Bill Withers (I know I know I know)
• Mao Zedong (mechanism vs. solution)

Version

Added Neil Jones, belatedly [13 Aug 2021]

Added Steven Strogatz and Queen Margrethe II of Denmark [23 Apr 2021]

Added Dines Bjørner and Hanne Gottliebsen [19 Apr 2021]

Added Richard M. Jones [08 Apr 2021]

Added Émile Henriot, Søren Kierkegaard, Chris Okasaki, Carolyn L. Talcott, and Ken Thompson [03 Apr 2021]

Added John McCarthy [31 Mar 2021]

Added Gad Elmaleh [30 Mar 2021]

Added Dave du Feu, Mike Gordon, Don Knuth, Plato, and Zeno of Elea [20 Mar 2021]

Added William Burge, George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Peter Schickele (yes, it is quite a crowd), Brian C. Smith, and Philip Wadler [14 Mar 2021]

Added Douglas Adams and William Shakespeare [08 Mar 2021]

Moved Stephen Cole Kleene to “Before Computer Science” and Richard Feynman to “Outside Computer Science”, despite his lectures on computation [24 Feb 2021]

Added Sigmund Freud and Gottfried Leibniz [23 Feb 2021]

Added Richard Feynman [16 Feb 2021]

Added Edgar Allan Poe and Calvin Russell [13 Feb 2021]

Added Haskell Curry and Grace Jones [06 Feb 2021]

Added Umberto Eco [31 Jan 2021]

Added Isaac Asimov, Peter J. Landin, and Robin Milner [30 Jan 2021]

Added Mel Brooks and Pierre Dac [29 Jan 2021]

Added Alan Turing and Mao Zedong [23 Jan 2021]

Created [17 Jan 2021]