Ralph E. Griswold, designer/developer of the Snobol and Icon programming languages, died on October 4, 2006. Ehud Lamm writes in his obituary:

Griswold's life work was in the area of non-numerical computing.[*] Griswold was the primary designer of series of string-manipulation languages (Icon was preceded by SL5 which was preceded by SNOBOL4). For many years strings were perhaps the most important and the most widely misunderstood data type in programming languages (perhaps now being displaced by XML trees). Griswold, though a university researcher for many years, should be considered firstly as a programming language innovator and inventor, and not an academic researcher in the usual sense of the word. Griswold, like the late Kenneth Iverson, invented and championed programming language constructs, and his contributions were among those that led the way to programming as currently understood. He was truly one of the founding figures of the field of programming language design.

As others have noted, computer science has always been a discipline where the founders were still around. This is changing.

Obituaries:

• University of Arizona
• Peter H. Salus
• Ehud Lamm