I agree with the Dennis Ritchie nomination, and I submit for the second best programmer of all time: Linus Torvalds.
He was a follower in the sense that UNIX had already been developed and was in wide-spread use, however, it was closed-source and very expensive to license. I would say he is the absolute accelerant of the open-source movement (although I would call Dennis Ritchie the father) and made it possible for the ubiquitous use of the new UNIX-like operating system called Linux. He wrote the kernel of that proliferant operating system that runs almost all of the internet.
It is mostly correctly known as GNU/Linux as the operating system itself is a conglomerate of various UNIX-like utilities, many of which were authored by the GNU group, and the Linux kernel that Linus authored.
To put into prospective what an achievement this is, he wrote the Linux kernel in a few years while the GNU Hurd (a GNU-developed kernel) has been under development for 25 years and has still yet to release a production-ready example.
Red Hat gifted Linus stock in their company valued near USD 1 million for his efforts.