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.