Carmack was the first to come to my mind in terms of individual programmer notoriety. In his day, he was probably considered by many to be the best programmer

Carmack was the first to come to my mind in terms of individual programmer notoriety. In his day, he was probably considered by many to be the best programmer in his field. Part of that had to do with pushing limits of the hardware at the time and also shipping code. With the speediness of computers now, this sort of raw optimization is less celebrated. Also, games and other projects have tended to become massive team efforts, harder to pinpoint to one great programmer.