[ ... ]
Not to mention Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church or Alan Turing.
Alan Turing _does_ seem to be on the list, which actually makes things
worse in a way: other than him, the list seems to consist primarily of
people still living and more or less active. Given his presence on the
list, how is it reasonable to omit the likes of Ada Lovelace, Robert
Floyd or William Friedman?
Unfortunately, a magazine has an inherent conflict of interest here:
their business consists of publishing new things on a regular basis,
but a well-run contest would produce results that changed only
relatively rarely.
This, of course, begs the question of whether the current list of
nominees resulted from ignorance or dishonesty. Then again, the answer
to that may not matter a whole lot -- though I guess we can hope that
either way the JDJ is an inaccurate relfection of the Java community as
a whole (and perhaps it can provide sufficient indication of the
quality of the JDJ to save somebody some money they might have
otherwise wasted on it).