Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer?
Can you tell a coder from a cannibal? A mathematician from a murderer? Try to spot who liked hacking away at corpses rather than computers
StartQuiz Questions
1. Bertrand Meyer- Initial designer of the Eiffel language and Design by Contract development method. Currently a Professor at the Polytechnic University of Milan
2. Dorothea Puente- The “Death House Landlady” ran a Sacramento boarding house in the ’80s and murdered at least 9 tenants before claiming their Social Security
3. John Christie- Killed 8 women at 10 Rillington Place, London. Arrested after new tenants tracing an unpleasant odour peeled off the kitchen wallpaper to reveal a corpse
4. Andrei Chikatilo- The “Butcher of Rostov” murdered and mutilated more than 50 people, mostly small children. He was told as a child that villagers had eaten his brother
5. John Mauchly- Co-designed the first electronic general-purpose computer and created Short Code, the first programming language actually used on a computer
6. Gerald Jay Sussman- Invented the Scheme programming language with Guy L. Steele Jr. and involved in MIT’s AI research. Member of the Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston
7. Anatoly Onoprienko- “The Terminator” killed entire families at point-blank range with a shotgun before setting the house alight; “To me, killing people is like ripping up a duvet”
8. Jean E. Sammet- Established much of the design of COBOL in two weeks along with five other programmers, and developed FORMAC, an early computer algebra system
9. Guido van Rossum- Created the Python programming language in 1989 to keep busy while his office was closed for Christmas, naming it after Monty Python’s Flying Circus
10. Randy Kraft- This programmer (not known to have invented any languages) was convicted of killing 16 young men, but kept a cryptic “scorecard” with 61 entries
