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

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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
Programming Language Inventor Serial Killer Next…Result

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  1. Wow, perhaps you instinctively fear coders and admire killers...?
  2. Pretty terrible, you can’t tell a Norman Bates from a Bill Gates
  3. Rather poor, maybe avoid working in criminology or I.T. recruitment
  4. Not bad, it seems you can sense logical brains versus clogged drains
  5. You’d spot Hannibal Lecter in seconds at a hack day. Your liver’s safe