Paul Graham (by alaric)
I like this guy's thinking on programming language design. It aligns pretty closely with my own ideas, and has some good ideas on syntax that I might borrow for CHROME...
And the way he implemented Viaweb is pretty similar to how I might have.
I think I'm more a fan of object orientation than he is, but this might just be a matter of terminology. I'm more of a fan of generic functions and Haskell-style classes than Java's OO.