It's fairly obvious if you actually read the list that it was just designed to provoke controversy by leaving several obvious people off the list.
I'm not sure it's that way deliberately; to me it just
feels like it was thrown together rather carelessly.
It has all the hallmarks of being poorly researched.
Probably everyone on the list did or does something
that is personally useful to the author(s). You'll
notice that certain companies (notably Sun and Google)
have their current and former employees quite heavily
represented. It's almost a sure thing that the place
where the author(s) work(s) relies heavily on those
companies' products. This probably reflects their
whole approach: what companies are important, and
who are their key people?
The blurbs are also careless; Kernighan's blurb, for
example, says nothing about C.
When people like Knuth aren't on the list, you
sort of figure the list is just not all that well
thought-out.
"In adjectives, with the addition of inflectional endings, a changeable long vowel (Qamets or Tsere) in an open, propretonic syllable will reduce to Vocal Shewa. This type of change occurs when the open, pretonic syllable of the masculine singular adjective becomes propretonic with the addition of inflectional endings."
— Pratico & Van Pelt, BBHG, p68
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