It's really nothing to get excited about. There are so many important programmers in the world that noone will remember them all. Not everyone works in the area where those people will mean anything more than a credit line in some tool they use... and that's fine.

I work with VoIP daily and could name lots of people who you "really should" know - you're using a phone all the time after all. Or people who create amazing stuff right now. But no... actually I don't expect that. Everyone has their own area of interest. I appreciate that someone wrote `cat` or one hundreds of other nice utilities, but I'm not going to read their history unless I've got a lot of free time and want to do that.