Here are the 10 (and I'm embaraced to say that I have not read most of them):
- On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules – David Parnas
- A Note On Distributed Computing – Jim Waldo, Geoff Wyant, Ann Wollrath, Sam Kendall
- The Next 700 Programming Languages – P. J. Landin
- Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? – John Backus
- Reflections on Trusting Trust – Ken Thompson
- Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big – Richard Gabriel
- An experimental evaluation of the assumption of independence in multiversion programming – John Knight and Nancy Leveson
- Arguments and Results – James Noble
- A Laboratory For Teaching Object-Oriented Thinking – Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham
- Programming as an Experience: the inspiration for Self – David Ungar, Randall B. Smith
If you don't have time to read them, or want to chose the first one to tackle, go to Michael's 10 Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice) post and read is brief description of each of these papers.
