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Ask HN: Who are your programming rockstars, and why?

Carmack, Torvalds, Bellard, Wozniak, et al. Who do you personally admire as 10x or otherwise brilliant coders? What do you consider their most notable or emulable accomplishments, habits, or contributions?

carapace 7y ago
Apenwarr. https://apenwarr.ca/log/ https://apenwarr.ca/log/ I know him a little IRL and, although he hasn't done anything that has made him famous, I believe he's in the same league.
mudderkugle 7y ago
John Shutt : https://fexpr.blogspot.com/ https://fexpr.blogspot.com/ https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/play.html https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/play.html He designed Kernel Programming Language, a very neat lisp that allow to exploit and reason about the semantics powers that lisp has binged over the years (symbolic, continuations, encapsulation …). I also highly appreciates the articles that he writes in his blog, they gave me “insights” ...
algaeontoast 7y ago
This guy I know who’s 5-6 years into his career and can in 2-4 days line up 10+ interviews and has an 80%+ rate of converting offers. Even though he had a period of spending 3-4 months at four different companies. It bows me away. That, to me at least is a rockstar programmer. Him, Jose Valim of the Eixir project and the guy who wrote Asciinema (one of the best examples of a web / systems project written in elixir and phoenix).
- nefitty 7y ago
  Do you have any insight into his method for procuring offers, or his portfolio that impressive?
  - algaeontoast 7y ago
    Not really, he never worked for a FAANG, only got into Cs after doing a two year program at a solid college after getting a political science degree from NYU.
    - BobLaw 7y ago
      Are you able to pm any more insights? As someone that's currently having trouble even getting a response this seems insane to me.
      - mikekchar 7y ago
        Not the OP and I'm not in a position where I'm hiring people, but feel free to send me your CV and I'll give you some feedback. Normally if you can't get a response it's because you've got a red flag on the CV. Getting job interviews and turning job interviews into job offers is a real skill, but it's a skill you can learn if you work at it. If you want, just remove any personally identifiable information from from your CV before sending it to me -- like I said, I'm not currently in a position where I'm hiring so no need to give me any personal info.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - algaeontoast 7y ago
        I know right, I think he has a really solid network. Yet, all the interviews he set up required tech screens and seemed random. Only other info is that his first job was at Comcast of all places.
kvajjha 7y ago
Leonardo de Moura.
rvz 7y ago
The funny thing is with those aforementioned so-called 'rockstar programmers', without Dennis Ritchie's creation and contributions to both UNIX and the C Programming Language, these 'rockstars' would have been totally unknown in the first place. And no, they are simply not '10x' programmers, they're just standing on the shoulders of giants like Ritchie as well as all other programmers are standing on their shoulders too.
- SamReidHughes 7y ago
  Nah, they would just use TurboPascal.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  Sure, Ritchie's awesome. But I'm not sure why engineers slag other engineers so often. Most of the startups in Silicon Valley started as prototypes written by one 10x guy. (For you HN pedants, that's called an "existence proof.") If you don't see 10x programmers after the startup phase, that's the fault of corporate mgmt. Tall poppy and all that.
  - ljw1001 7y ago
    > If you don't see 10x programmers after the startup phase, that's the fault of corporate mgmt. Tall poppy and all that. Actually, it's because building a real product is 10x harder than building a prototype.
- wenc 7y ago
  Not to gainsay C's role, but there were a number of competing languages back then with pretty innovative ideas (check out the history of programming languages), and even if C didn't exist, something else would have taken its place. Because a discovery is more foundational doesn't mean its discoverer is necessarily more of a genius (it can mean that, but it doesn't necessarily). For example, just because Newton and Leibniz discovered the calculus, it doesn't mean they were necessarily greater geniuses (though Newton was a genius) than mathematicians who came after. Earlier discoveries are impressive because the discoverers had to see something that no one else saw; but on the other hand, it would have been much easier for them to make progress because you reach breakthroughs very quickly once there's an attack. Compare this to fields that are mature -- it's very very hard to make a dent even if you are 10x the genius of the founder of the field. Comparing geniuses who were active in different periods of time is hard because it's kinda apples and oranges. For inspiration, take a look at this list [1]. [1] History of Programming Languages: Prominent people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages#Prominent_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag...
redis_mlc 7y ago
I agree that Wozniak should get more credit for both his combined and separate hardware and software results. Two programmers that are still not fully-appreciated are: 1) Monty Widenius (MySQL, the foundation of both Web 1.0 and 2.0) 2) Antirez (Redis, also the foundation of Web 2.0)
bigred100 7y ago
Jack Dongarra of perhaps most specially BLAS/LAPACK fame.
wenc 7y ago
I don't do development full-time anymore and haven't kept up to date with superstars in the programming world so take this opinion with a grain of salt. I've always admired the clarity of thought of Rich Hickey [1], creator of Clojure. I wish I could point to a single article or post that outlines his philosophy, but they're all over the Internet. I used to spend hours in the early 2010s scouring the web for his writings/videos. What I find admirable about Rich is that he was originally trained as a musician, yet has an impressive theoretical grasp of software concepts and is tempered in his designs by way of a battle-tested pragmatism (stemming from his having written software for real-world systems). I've never written a single line of Clojure (and it's unlikely I will ever do so), but his thinking process has been an inspiration to me. [1] https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/opinion/geek-of-the-week/rich-hickey-geek-of-the-week/ https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/opinion/geek-of-the-wee...
- ooooak 7y ago
  Agree, Clojure has the most influence on me. There are lots of things to learn from Clojure and I don't see anyone taking lessons from Clojure people. it seems like everything is just one large MVC after rails. We are not ready to move on.
OldManAndTheCpp 7y ago
Ulrich Drepper. I know him personally, and respect his contributions to glibc. His writing style on bug tickets was blunt, but in most of the examples I’ve seen I believe he had the correct argument in the end (the exception is his calling ARM a toy instruction set). https://www.akkadia.org/drepper/ https://www.akkadia.org/drepper/
folkhack 7y ago
An unsung hero of mine is John Resig... hear me out - TONS of stuff that jQuery had became mainstream over the years, and I think it did a lot to popularize things like AJAX which led to much more dynamic web experiences. It was the first library that worked consistently well across the board, provided an easy-to-use CSS-selector based experience to query and manipulate the DOM, and had very solid documentation. I feel like jQuery is/was a mainstay of the web and although we've seen it lose popularity over the years it's still one of the biggest game changers in my web development tooling. He also is a key player at Khan Academy* which is one of the best online learning resources to date. All-in-all I think the guy is an excellent example of an entrepreneurial engineer and I would fanboy so hard if I ever met him. * Not founder of Khan Academy (doh!)
- otoburb 7y ago
  >>He also started Khan Academy which is one of the best online learning resources to date. I agree with your points about John Resig (great choice!), except I'm pretty sure that Resig joined Khan Academy in 2011[1] while Salman Khan[2] was the sole founder in 2008[3]. [1] https://johnresig.com/blog/next-steps-in-2011/- https://johnresig.com/blog/next-steps-in-2011/- [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sal_Khan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sal_Khan [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy
  - folkhack 7y ago
    Ah thanks for the correction! Edited my comment for accuracy =)
- meraku 7y ago
  John Resig does deserve a lot of credit for his work on jQuery and at Khan Academy. Small correction though, he wasn't a founder of Khan Academy. It was started in 2008 by Sal Khan, and Resig joined later in 2011.
  - folkhack 7y ago
    Corrected! Thanks for the heads up!!
ioddly 7y ago
Fabrice Bellard: http://bellard.org http://bellard.org Notable: no social media, nothing like that. Just shows up occasionally with something that would take another dev probably a couple years to do.
- bumbledraven 7y ago
  No daily scrum. No social media. No code of conduct. He just sat there. Programming. Like a psychopath.
  - jariel 7y ago
    In software, you get economies of focus, not so much economies of scale. But he generally creates 'tech', not 'products' which are much harder to make. Though of course we owe him and others like him a lot.
- rramadass 7y ago
  A bazillion times this! Fabrice Bellard is a "programming god" in my opinion :-) The man has done so many different and complicated things that it is mind-blowing. Nobody else even comes close. I really would like to understand his thought processes and way of working. What drives him? How does he approach design and implementation? What are his thoughts on "Software Engineering"? Etcetra, Etcetra ... Somebody needs to do a proper in-depth interview with him and get him to write a book. There is a brain i really would like to know :-)
- twic 7y ago
  I always get Fabrice Bellard mixed up with Daniel Lemire. Both hardcore programmers and fine writers, both have French names - although i believe Bellard is French, and Lemire is Quebecois!
AndrewKemendo 7y ago
I'm pretty surprised to not see Jeff Dean mentioned so far. Co-Inventor with Sanjay Ghemawat on: - MapReduce - Spanner - BigTable - Tensorflow Jeff Dean Facts: https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-facts https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-facts
- rramadass 7y ago
  Sanjay Ghemawat is as big as Jeff Dean. It is just that he is more of an introvert and takes a backseat to Jeff in the public discourse. Here is a great article on their partnership: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship... Quote: But, for those who know them both, Sanjay is an equal talent. “Jeff is great at coming up with wild new ideas and prototyping things,” Wilson Hsieh, their longtime colleague, said. “Sanjay was the one who built things to last.”
  - AndrewKemendo 7y ago
    Yea it was a toss-up between the two, but there's been so little out there about Sanjay that he's hard to know enough about to emulate unless you work with him directly I assume. Jeff on the other hand, because he's slightly more extroverted as you point out, does videos and press which makes it easier to follow him.
- farrelmahaztra 7y ago
  Searched the comments for this. I read Jeff Dean's undergrad thesis and it's super inspiring to see how skilled he was way, way before Google
amitprayal 7y ago
Slava Pestov, who started the jEdit Editor, created the Factor programming language and now working on Swift.
Gorbzel 7y ago
Chris Lattner
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
xbhdhdhd 7y ago
Carmack is not only at the top of my list but is an awesome communicator at the same time.
closeparen 7y ago
Rich Hickey is the model of technical leadership. - He reflects on the experience of programming. - He identifies and can articulate what's wrong with our tools, conventions, and thinking. - He builds and advocates abstractions that don't suffer from those problems. Even if Clojure and Datomic remain obscure, he'll have taught me what I want to be when I grow up.
- yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
  I might agree with you if it weren't for his misguided railings against types.
kazinator 7y ago
Philip Greenspun https://philip.greenspun.com/personal/resume https://philip.greenspun.com/personal/resume
xrd 7y ago
Brad Fitzpatrick (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Fitzpatrick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Fitzpatrick). He invented lots of cool stuff before he got heavily involved with Golang. It was inspiring to see him talking at Perl meetups in Portland back when Perl was cool. Derek Sivers is a great developer because he shared his experiences learning (at the time Ruby on Rails was brand new). He's doing that same sharing now with a higher level of abstraction, sharing about how to think.
- logicuce 7y ago
  Yes. A fan of Brad myself. The number of things he invented (memcached, gearman, djabberd, etc.) or had a direct impact on (OpenID, PubSub in general, Golang, etc.) is phenomenal. His website gives a better idea of his interests and involvements. http://www.bradfitz.com/ http://www.bradfitz.com/
zzo38computer 7y ago
I think, Knuth. I think TeX and METAFONT and MMIX and TAOCP and so on is good.
- mcv 7y ago
  Knuth is my favourite on several levels. He wrote the definitive version of quite a number of algorithms, and when he wrote The Art Of Computer Programming, he wrote TeX because he was unhappy with the state of typesetting technology at the time. There are legendary stories about his ability to program bug-free code on on his first try and his ability to debug other people's code while he was typing it for them on punchcards.
muzani 7y ago
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Bill Gates. Building a boot loader on a flight. Solving the same problems most of us do daily, but while in school and with a lower level language. A career with operating systems. Chris Sawyer. Built a fun, complex game in Assembly that most people can't do with JavaScript. Barbara Liskov. Lay the foundation for object oriented back when there was nothing to start with. Tarn Adams. Lots of room for improvement, but incredible, incredible stamina and understanding of mathematics and procedural generation.
throwaway34241 7y ago
Mike Pall Writing a full just-in-time compiler for a dynamic language (Lua) [1] that was not only much faster than contemporary browser Javascript engines, but also faster than the Android JVM (at the time) [2]. Also porting that compiler to emit x86, x64, ARM, PPC, MIPS. All as one person. It was so impressive that I'm actually a little curious what he's been working on now, since he's mostly moved on from the project and has (I'm sure deliberately) little online presence. Maybe some company has some amazing secret project that we'll find out about someday. [1] http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2009-11/msg00089.html http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2009-11/msg00089.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2617628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2617628
tehlike 7y ago
Oren eini/ayende rahien. Hands down one of the best. Great at both low level and high level programming...
rramadass 7y ago
I have come around to worshiping the pioneers :-) Edsger W. Dijkstra, Niklaus Wirth, Tony Hoare etc. Though i have not read all their works (nor completely understood their ideas) just the way of exposition and breadth of their thoughts, the insistence on mathematical rigour and formalism etc. always makes me think that i don't yet understand what "programming" is all about. Just slinging code is NOT enough. The idea of programming to a specification using "correctness by design" methodologies (eg. Hoare triples and logic) seems to me to be fundamental to programming. And yet most of us only follow "trial and error" methodology limited by our own lack of knowledge and discipline.
richardjdare 7y ago
Andrew Braybrook - Game designer and programmer of Paradroid and Uridium amongst others. Prominent in the 8 and 16bit era (an age of rockstars, really) I still think about those days to inspire myself. Kai Krause - Early Photoshop pioneer, designer of Kai's Power Tools, Bryce. I see him as a kind of artist/programmer, who demonstrated that application software development wasn't just about cranking out features, but about creating an experience for the user, a particular window onto this amazing digital world. Matthew Dillon - Developer of Dragonfly BSD and prominent old-school Amiga hacker. Absolutely solid programmer. Wish he did more interviews. Rich Hickey - I don't yet have a reason to use Clojure or Datomic, but I watch every Rich Hickey talk or interview I can get my hands on. Hammock Driven Development is the only development ideology that appeals to me :)
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Bjarne Stroustrup. Alexander Stepanov. (I once pointed out to him a bug in the first version of the STL. Me, a nobody that he had never heard of before. He emailed me three generations of bug fixes in the next two hours.)
gitgud 7y ago
George Hotz is an excellent programmer and presenter. I like the way that he talks and explains things. He compares the Tesla to the iPhone and his system Comma AI to the Android.
- tudelo 7y ago
  He seems smart, but an excellent presenter? I really never got that vibe. He always seems like he is on way too many stimulants.
quickthrower2 7y ago
Evan Czaplicki. He created the Elm language. While other people ported Haskell-like languages to the web (Purescript, GHCJS, Fay, ... ), Evan found a way to tame the complexity of the web with an evolving architecture that start with something like FRP / Rx and ended up with the Elm Architecture, which hits a sweet spot. You can even use T.E.A. without using Elm! Although it's best using a functional language that supports immutability, otherwise there is more work trying to not mutate things. T.E.A. has been copied to a number of different languages and is manifested inside the Redux pattern. I think time will hopefully tell that his work will have big influence on UI and Web development in the 2020's, whether we are directly using Elm or something based on those ideas. T.E.A. is: A global state. A set of defined messages that can be sent to update the global state. An update function - given a message, and the global state returns a new global state and any asynchronous "commands" to execute. Commands go off and do something then post a message once done. A view function - given a global state returns a representation of how to render the UI. This representation includes messages to send on events such as "onclick". Subscriptions - these produce messages when things happen in the real world, for example local storage state changes.
Razengan 7y ago
People like Matthew Smith, the guy behind Manic Miner, and the many other “bedroom coders” of the 1980s and early 90s. :) https://youtu.be/Dss-HZb2YWI https://youtu.be/Dss-HZb2YWI
- stevekemp 7y ago
  Matthew Smith, and later Julian Gollop were definite early "heros" of mine. The former for the obvious reason, the latter almost solely for Chaos. I can recognize a lot of modern developers who are very productive, and seem to have multiple projects on the go. But I always think of Antirez first, he's humble, quiet, thoughtful, and thoroughly competent. I'd rather work with a careful, slow, and precise, person that an army of super-coders.
deepaksurti 7y ago
Many but PG (paul graham) for his books on Lisp and Lisp essays; they literally changed my programming career and many many others I think!
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
It seems for a lot of people in this thread one of the defining aspects of being a rockstar is to produce something that other programmers all use - most generally a language but also a ubiquitous library like JQuery that ends up defining the future direction of the language it is written for. I suppose that one could argue by writing things for other programmers their productivity using your tools can be seen as an extension of yours - that without John Resig many people would have been less productive therefor he derives a little bit of productivity from each person who uses his library. But maybe it is just because these are the programmers you are most likely to be familiar with.
thisone 7y ago
two former co-workers who aren't "names" in the industry. They could argue with grace, they could see what was needed and build it. And even the projects that were built quickly were easy for other people to work on and extend.
badpun 7y ago
Jonathan Blow. His ability to retain focus and clarity for hours (as demonstrated on streams, while doing high-quality coding) seems out of reach for an average dev like me. Clearly an outlier.
james1212 7y ago
hello
- james1212 7y ago
  keep it up
manls 7y ago
John McCarthy, the creator of Lisp. He also played a big role in the progress of artificial intelligence in the early 1950s.
- jonjacky 7y ago
  He was also among the first - maybe the first - to propose time-sharing and helped build one of the earliest time-sharing systems.
fredsanford 7y ago
No mention of Michael Abrash? He was a truly original thinker and one of the best with optimization. Icer Addis of Bloodlust Software had a pretty spectacular run in the '90s with at least 3 high quality emulators. As for current times, Andrew Gallant, (BurntSushi (ripgrep and related software)) writes very high quality code that is very usable.
twic 7y ago
Inigo Quilez, a demoscene programmer who does amazing work - of a very high technical and artistic standard, often in painfully tiny sizes - and then writes lucidly about it: http://iquilezles.org/www/index.htm http://iquilezles.org/www/index.htm Here's 'Elevated' a four-kilobyte demo he did (along with others): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o And here's the writeup: http://iquilezles.org/www/material/function2009/function2009.pdf http://iquilezles.org/www/material/function2009/function2009...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rakeshgupta 7y ago
Linus Torvalds : Linus Torvalds, the founder of the Linux open-source operating system, has been leading his developer community with sarcasm, insults, and abuse for three decades, and many people think it’s time for a change. Torvalds is a legend in the open-source community for the way he’s stuck to his principles and steered a free project into a giant. But open-source work is a largely thankless job that people volunteer to participate in, and their work is rarely seen outside of a small group of people.

carapace 7y ago

Apenwarr. https://apenwarr.ca/log/ https://apenwarr.ca/log/ I know him a little IRL and, although he hasn't done anything that has made him famous, I believe he's in the same league.

mudderkugle 7y ago

John Shutt : https://fexpr.blogspot.com/ https://fexpr.blogspot.com/ https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/play.html https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/play.html He designed Kernel Programming Language, a very neat lisp that allow to exploit and reason about the semantics powers that lisp has binged over the years (symbolic, continuations, encapsulation …). I also highly appreciates the articles that he writes in his blog, they gave me “insights” ...

algaeontoast 7y ago

This guy I know who’s 5-6 years into his career and can in 2-4 days line up 10+ interviews and has an 80%+ rate of converting offers. Even though he had a period of spending 3-4 months at four different companies. It bows me away. That, to me at least is a rockstar programmer. Him, Jose Valim of the Eixir project and the guy who wrote Asciinema (one of the best examples of a web / systems project written in elixir and phoenix).

nefitty 7y ago
Do you have any insight into his method for procuring offers, or his portfolio that impressive?
- algaeontoast 7y ago
  Not really, he never worked for a FAANG, only got into Cs after doing a two year program at a solid college after getting a political science degree from NYU.
  - BobLaw 7y ago
    Are you able to pm any more insights? As someone that's currently having trouble even getting a response this seems insane to me.
    - mikekchar 7y ago
      Not the OP and I'm not in a position where I'm hiring people, but feel free to send me your CV and I'll give you some feedback. Normally if you can't get a response it's because you've got a red flag on the CV. Getting job interviews and turning job interviews into job offers is a real skill, but it's a skill you can learn if you work at it. If you want, just remove any personally identifiable information from from your CV before sending it to me -- like I said, I'm not currently in a position where I'm hiring so no need to give me any personal info.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - algaeontoast 7y ago
      I know right, I think he has a really solid network. Yet, all the interviews he set up required tech screens and seemed random. Only other info is that his first job was at Comcast of all places.

kvajjha 7y ago

Leonardo de Moura.

rvz 7y ago

The funny thing is with those aforementioned so-called 'rockstar programmers', without Dennis Ritchie's creation and contributions to both UNIX and the C Programming Language, these 'rockstars' would have been totally unknown in the first place. And no, they are simply not '10x' programmers, they're just standing on the shoulders of giants like Ritchie as well as all other programmers are standing on their shoulders too.

SamReidHughes 7y ago
Nah, they would just use TurboPascal.
redis_mlc 7y ago
Sure, Ritchie's awesome. But I'm not sure why engineers slag other engineers so often. Most of the startups in Silicon Valley started as prototypes written by one 10x guy. (For you HN pedants, that's called an "existence proof.") If you don't see 10x programmers after the startup phase, that's the fault of corporate mgmt. Tall poppy and all that.
- ljw1001 7y ago
  > If you don't see 10x programmers after the startup phase, that's the fault of corporate mgmt. Tall poppy and all that. Actually, it's because building a real product is 10x harder than building a prototype.
wenc 7y ago
Not to gainsay C's role, but there were a number of competing languages back then with pretty innovative ideas (check out the history of programming languages), and even if C didn't exist, something else would have taken its place. Because a discovery is more foundational doesn't mean its discoverer is necessarily more of a genius (it can mean that, but it doesn't necessarily). For example, just because Newton and Leibniz discovered the calculus, it doesn't mean they were necessarily greater geniuses (though Newton was a genius) than mathematicians who came after. Earlier discoveries are impressive because the discoverers had to see something that no one else saw; but on the other hand, it would have been much easier for them to make progress because you reach breakthroughs very quickly once there's an attack. Compare this to fields that are mature -- it's very very hard to make a dent even if you are 10x the genius of the founder of the field. Comparing geniuses who were active in different periods of time is hard because it's kinda apples and oranges. For inspiration, take a look at this list [1]. [1] History of Programming Languages: Prominent people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages#Prominent_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag...

redis_mlc 7y ago

I agree that Wozniak should get more credit for both his combined and separate hardware and software results. Two programmers that are still not fully-appreciated are: 1) Monty Widenius (MySQL, the foundation of both Web 1.0 and 2.0) 2) Antirez (Redis, also the foundation of Web 2.0)

bigred100 7y ago

Jack Dongarra of perhaps most specially BLAS/LAPACK fame.

wenc 7y ago

I don't do development full-time anymore and haven't kept up to date with superstars in the programming world so take this opinion with a grain of salt. I've always admired the clarity of thought of Rich Hickey [1], creator of Clojure. I wish I could point to a single article or post that outlines his philosophy, but they're all over the Internet. I used to spend hours in the early 2010s scouring the web for his writings/videos. What I find admirable about Rich is that he was originally trained as a musician, yet has an impressive theoretical grasp of software concepts and is tempered in his designs by way of a battle-tested pragmatism (stemming from his having written software for real-world systems). I've never written a single line of Clojure (and it's unlikely I will ever do so), but his thinking process has been an inspiration to me. [1] https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/opinion/geek-of-the-week/rich-hickey-geek-of-the-week/ https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/opinion/geek-of-the-wee...

ooooak 7y ago
Agree, Clojure has the most influence on me. There are lots of things to learn from Clojure and I don't see anyone taking lessons from Clojure people. it seems like everything is just one large MVC after rails. We are not ready to move on.

OldManAndTheCpp 7y ago

Ulrich Drepper. I know him personally, and respect his contributions to glibc. His writing style on bug tickets was blunt, but in most of the examples I’ve seen I believe he had the correct argument in the end (the exception is his calling ARM a toy instruction set). https://www.akkadia.org/drepper/ https://www.akkadia.org/drepper/

folkhack 7y ago

An unsung hero of mine is John Resig... hear me out - TONS of stuff that jQuery had became mainstream over the years, and I think it did a lot to popularize things like AJAX which led to much more dynamic web experiences. It was the first library that worked consistently well across the board, provided an easy-to-use CSS-selector based experience to query and manipulate the DOM, and had very solid documentation. I feel like jQuery is/was a mainstay of the web and although we've seen it lose popularity over the years it's still one of the biggest game changers in my web development tooling. He also is a key player at Khan Academy* which is one of the best online learning resources to date. All-in-all I think the guy is an excellent example of an entrepreneurial engineer and I would fanboy so hard if I ever met him. * Not founder of Khan Academy (doh!)

otoburb 7y ago
>>He also started Khan Academy which is one of the best online learning resources to date. I agree with your points about John Resig (great choice!), except I'm pretty sure that Resig joined Khan Academy in 2011[1] while Salman Khan[2] was the sole founder in 2008[3]. [1] https://johnresig.com/blog/next-steps-in-2011/- https://johnresig.com/blog/next-steps-in-2011/- [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sal_Khan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sal_Khan [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy
- folkhack 7y ago
  Ah thanks for the correction! Edited my comment for accuracy =)
meraku 7y ago
John Resig does deserve a lot of credit for his work on jQuery and at Khan Academy. Small correction though, he wasn't a founder of Khan Academy. It was started in 2008 by Sal Khan, and Resig joined later in 2011.
- folkhack 7y ago
  Corrected! Thanks for the heads up!!

ioddly 7y ago

Fabrice Bellard: http://bellard.org http://bellard.org Notable: no social media, nothing like that. Just shows up occasionally with something that would take another dev probably a couple years to do.

bumbledraven 7y ago
No daily scrum. No social media. No code of conduct. He just sat there. Programming. Like a psychopath.
- jariel 7y ago
  In software, you get economies of focus, not so much economies of scale. But he generally creates 'tech', not 'products' which are much harder to make. Though of course we owe him and others like him a lot.
rramadass 7y ago
A bazillion times this! Fabrice Bellard is a "programming god" in my opinion :-) The man has done so many different and complicated things that it is mind-blowing. Nobody else even comes close. I really would like to understand his thought processes and way of working. What drives him? How does he approach design and implementation? What are his thoughts on "Software Engineering"? Etcetra, Etcetra ... Somebody needs to do a proper in-depth interview with him and get him to write a book. There is a brain i really would like to know :-)
twic 7y ago
I always get Fabrice Bellard mixed up with Daniel Lemire. Both hardcore programmers and fine writers, both have French names - although i believe Bellard is French, and Lemire is Quebecois!

AndrewKemendo 7y ago

I'm pretty surprised to not see Jeff Dean mentioned so far. Co-Inventor with Sanjay Ghemawat on: - MapReduce - Spanner - BigTable - Tensorflow Jeff Dean Facts: https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-facts https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-facts

rramadass 7y ago
Sanjay Ghemawat is as big as Jeff Dean. It is just that he is more of an introvert and takes a backseat to Jeff in the public discourse. Here is a great article on their partnership: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship... Quote: But, for those who know them both, Sanjay is an equal talent. “Jeff is great at coming up with wild new ideas and prototyping things,” Wilson Hsieh, their longtime colleague, said. “Sanjay was the one who built things to last.”
- AndrewKemendo 7y ago
  Yea it was a toss-up between the two, but there's been so little out there about Sanjay that he's hard to know enough about to emulate unless you work with him directly I assume. Jeff on the other hand, because he's slightly more extroverted as you point out, does videos and press which makes it easier to follow him.
farrelmahaztra 7y ago
Searched the comments for this. I read Jeff Dean's undergrad thesis and it's super inspiring to see how skilled he was way, way before Google

amitprayal 7y ago

Slava Pestov, who started the jEdit Editor, created the Factor programming language and now working on Swift.

Gorbzel 7y ago

Chris Lattner

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xbhdhdhd 7y ago

Carmack is not only at the top of my list but is an awesome communicator at the same time.

closeparen 7y ago

Rich Hickey is the model of technical leadership. - He reflects on the experience of programming. - He identifies and can articulate what's wrong with our tools, conventions, and thinking. - He builds and advocates abstractions that don't suffer from those problems. Even if Clojure and Datomic remain obscure, he'll have taught me what I want to be when I grow up.

yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
I might agree with you if it weren't for his misguided railings against types.

kazinator 7y ago

Philip Greenspun https://philip.greenspun.com/personal/resume https://philip.greenspun.com/personal/resume

xrd 7y ago

Brad Fitzpatrick (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Fitzpatrick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Fitzpatrick). He invented lots of cool stuff before he got heavily involved with Golang. It was inspiring to see him talking at Perl meetups in Portland back when Perl was cool. Derek Sivers is a great developer because he shared his experiences learning (at the time Ruby on Rails was brand new). He's doing that same sharing now with a higher level of abstraction, sharing about how to think.

logicuce 7y ago
Yes. A fan of Brad myself. The number of things he invented (memcached, gearman, djabberd, etc.) or had a direct impact on (OpenID, PubSub in general, Golang, etc.) is phenomenal. His website gives a better idea of his interests and involvements. http://www.bradfitz.com/ http://www.bradfitz.com/

zzo38computer 7y ago

I think, Knuth. I think TeX and METAFONT and MMIX and TAOCP and so on is good.

mcv 7y ago
Knuth is my favourite on several levels. He wrote the definitive version of quite a number of algorithms, and when he wrote The Art Of Computer Programming, he wrote TeX because he was unhappy with the state of typesetting technology at the time. There are legendary stories about his ability to program bug-free code on on his first try and his ability to debug other people's code while he was typing it for them on punchcards.

muzani 7y ago

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Bill Gates. Building a boot loader on a flight. Solving the same problems most of us do daily, but while in school and with a lower level language. A career with operating systems. Chris Sawyer. Built a fun, complex game in Assembly that most people can't do with JavaScript. Barbara Liskov. Lay the foundation for object oriented back when there was nothing to start with. Tarn Adams. Lots of room for improvement, but incredible, incredible stamina and understanding of mathematics and procedural generation.

throwaway34241 7y ago

Mike Pall Writing a full just-in-time compiler for a dynamic language (Lua) [1] that was not only much faster than contemporary browser Javascript engines, but also faster than the Android JVM (at the time) [2]. Also porting that compiler to emit x86, x64, ARM, PPC, MIPS. All as one person. It was so impressive that I'm actually a little curious what he's been working on now, since he's mostly moved on from the project and has (I'm sure deliberately) little online presence. Maybe some company has some amazing secret project that we'll find out about someday. [1] http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2009-11/msg00089.html http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2009-11/msg00089.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2617628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2617628

tehlike 7y ago

Oren eini/ayende rahien. Hands down one of the best. Great at both low level and high level programming...

rramadass 7y ago

I have come around to worshiping the pioneers :-) Edsger W. Dijkstra, Niklaus Wirth, Tony Hoare etc. Though i have not read all their works (nor completely understood their ideas) just the way of exposition and breadth of their thoughts, the insistence on mathematical rigour and formalism etc. always makes me think that i don't yet understand what "programming" is all about. Just slinging code is NOT enough. The idea of programming to a specification using "correctness by design" methodologies (eg. Hoare triples and logic) seems to me to be fundamental to programming. And yet most of us only follow "trial and error" methodology limited by our own lack of knowledge and discipline.

richardjdare 7y ago

Andrew Braybrook - Game designer and programmer of Paradroid and Uridium amongst others. Prominent in the 8 and 16bit era (an age of rockstars, really) I still think about those days to inspire myself. Kai Krause - Early Photoshop pioneer, designer of Kai's Power Tools, Bryce. I see him as a kind of artist/programmer, who demonstrated that application software development wasn't just about cranking out features, but about creating an experience for the user, a particular window onto this amazing digital world. Matthew Dillon - Developer of Dragonfly BSD and prominent old-school Amiga hacker. Absolutely solid programmer. Wish he did more interviews. Rich Hickey - I don't yet have a reason to use Clojure or Datomic, but I watch every Rich Hickey talk or interview I can get my hands on. Hammock Driven Development is the only development ideology that appeals to me :)

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

Bjarne Stroustrup. Alexander Stepanov. (I once pointed out to him a bug in the first version of the STL. Me, a nobody that he had never heard of before. He emailed me three generations of bug fixes in the next two hours.)

gitgud 7y ago

George Hotz is an excellent programmer and presenter. I like the way that he talks and explains things. He compares the Tesla to the iPhone and his system Comma AI to the Android.

tudelo 7y ago
He seems smart, but an excellent presenter? I really never got that vibe. He always seems like he is on way too many stimulants.

quickthrower2 7y ago

Evan Czaplicki. He created the Elm language. While other people ported Haskell-like languages to the web (Purescript, GHCJS, Fay, ... ), Evan found a way to tame the complexity of the web with an evolving architecture that start with something like FRP / Rx and ended up with the Elm Architecture, which hits a sweet spot. You can even use T.E.A. without using Elm! Although it's best using a functional language that supports immutability, otherwise there is more work trying to not mutate things. T.E.A. has been copied to a number of different languages and is manifested inside the Redux pattern. I think time will hopefully tell that his work will have big influence on UI and Web development in the 2020's, whether we are directly using Elm or something based on those ideas. T.E.A. is: A global state. A set of defined messages that can be sent to update the global state. An update function - given a message, and the global state returns a new global state and any asynchronous "commands" to execute. Commands go off and do something then post a message once done. A view function - given a global state returns a representation of how to render the UI. This representation includes messages to send on events such as "onclick". Subscriptions - these produce messages when things happen in the real world, for example local storage state changes.

Razengan 7y ago

People like Matthew Smith, the guy behind Manic Miner, and the many other “bedroom coders” of the 1980s and early 90s. :) https://youtu.be/Dss-HZb2YWI https://youtu.be/Dss-HZb2YWI

stevekemp 7y ago
Matthew Smith, and later Julian Gollop were definite early "heros" of mine. The former for the obvious reason, the latter almost solely for Chaos. I can recognize a lot of modern developers who are very productive, and seem to have multiple projects on the go. But I always think of Antirez first, he's humble, quiet, thoughtful, and thoroughly competent. I'd rather work with a careful, slow, and precise, person that an army of super-coders.

deepaksurti 7y ago

Many but PG (paul graham) for his books on Lisp and Lisp essays; they literally changed my programming career and many many others I think!

bryanrasmussen 7y ago

It seems for a lot of people in this thread one of the defining aspects of being a rockstar is to produce something that other programmers all use - most generally a language but also a ubiquitous library like JQuery that ends up defining the future direction of the language it is written for. I suppose that one could argue by writing things for other programmers their productivity using your tools can be seen as an extension of yours - that without John Resig many people would have been less productive therefor he derives a little bit of productivity from each person who uses his library. But maybe it is just because these are the programmers you are most likely to be familiar with.

thisone 7y ago

two former co-workers who aren't "names" in the industry. They could argue with grace, they could see what was needed and build it. And even the projects that were built quickly were easy for other people to work on and extend.

badpun 7y ago

Jonathan Blow. His ability to retain focus and clarity for hours (as demonstrated on streams, while doing high-quality coding) seems out of reach for an average dev like me. Clearly an outlier.

james1212 7y ago

hello

james1212 7y ago
keep it up

manls 7y ago

John McCarthy, the creator of Lisp. He also played a big role in the progress of artificial intelligence in the early 1950s.

jonjacky 7y ago
He was also among the first - maybe the first - to propose time-sharing and helped build one of the earliest time-sharing systems.

fredsanford 7y ago

No mention of Michael Abrash? He was a truly original thinker and one of the best with optimization. Icer Addis of Bloodlust Software had a pretty spectacular run in the '90s with at least 3 high quality emulators. As for current times, Andrew Gallant, (BurntSushi (ripgrep and related software)) writes very high quality code that is very usable.

twic 7y ago

Inigo Quilez, a demoscene programmer who does amazing work - of a very high technical and artistic standard, often in painfully tiny sizes - and then writes lucidly about it: http://iquilezles.org/www/index.htm http://iquilezles.org/www/index.htm Here's 'Elevated' a four-kilobyte demo he did (along with others): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o And here's the writeup: http://iquilezles.org/www/material/function2009/function2009.pdf http://iquilezles.org/www/material/function2009/function2009...

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rakeshgupta 7y ago

Linus Torvalds : Linus Torvalds, the founder of the Linux open-source operating system, has been leading his developer community with sarcasm, insults, and abuse for three decades, and many people think it’s time for a change. Torvalds is a legend in the open-source community for the way he’s stuck to his principles and steered a free project into a giant. But open-source work is a largely thankless job that people volunteer to participate in, and their work is rarely seen outside of a small group of people.