The list seems mostly people who are doing a lot of work in the public. I voted "other" for our beloved Sullivan Beck (SBECK) for tirelessly maintaining Date::Manip.

It's not "glorious" work that will get you on the front page of a newspaper. But it's the kind of work that is necessary for a programming language, it's neverending and it affects a lot of production critical code paths (so errors are not an option).

A lot of this kind of work goes on "behind the scenes" for every programming language. I think it's important that we, as a community, show our appreciation not only to the publicly visible people. You know the ones that pop up in news items and at the top of release notes. We should give our thanks and our support for the people who single-handedly maintain critical parts of our unseed infrastructure.

I only had one vote to give, but there are at least three similar dozen maintainers of irreplacable code i could list in a couple of hours just by looking at my own softwares dependency graphs.