Programming inherently has no value. It's the application of programming which is powerful and valuable. I'm assuming by "top", you're talking about the people

Programming inherently has no value. It's the application of programming which is powerful and valuable. I'm assuming by "top", you're talking about the people who are consistently able to create outsized value rather than people who can crank out TopCoder contests. The application of programming is a multi-disciplinary skill and very very context dependent. The skills needed for a product focused engineer at a 10 person company is far far different than a platform engineer at say - AWS. Also, programming is so vast a field now that your question is simply too broad and has no concrete answer. Perhaps a better question is something specific like "Who are the top iOS UI engineers in the world?". We're far past the point in our field where there is a "top" person who is good at the entire field broadly.