The good guys at The Changelog podcast (Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo) used to ask this question to people the interview on the show.

It's nice to see who are the heroes of people you really think are great programmers themselves. So, it would be nice to see who are this community's heroes. I'll start.

My programming hero is Dennis Ritchie. Not only for his technical skills but mainly for the huge contributions he made to the evolution of computer systems, software development and programming teaching and learning.

Let's go. Who is your programming hero?