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Stackoverflow: Are there any famous one-man-army programmers?
- chops 16y agoI'm surprised to see Markus Alexej Persson (aka Notch) missing from that list for Minecraft. Between doing the coding and art, he's demonstrated that he can basically do it all.
- archangel_one 16y agoAgree. Similarly for Tarn Adams (Dwarf Fortress) - I guess not so much the art in that case, but programming a cult hit like that by yourself is pretty impressive to me.
- cruise02 16y agoInstead of being surprised to see an answer missing, why not add the answer?
- chops 16y agoBecause I'd have to make an account to answer this one question, while I'm already a member here at HN.
- xiongchiamiov 16y agoThere's not much to creating an account if you use OpenID. Two clicks from the login page, IIRC.
- Andys 16y agoGood spot to observe how OpenID doesn't make people any less likely to bother logging in
- cruise02 16y agoYou don't have to make an account to answer questions on Stack Overflow. http://stackoverflow.com/faq#login http://stackoverflow.com/faq#login
- olalonde 16y ago> Chris Sawyer [...] RollerCoaster Tycoon [...] entire game was written in assembly language. That is quite humbling to say the least.
- iuguy 16y agoReally? Around the time of RollerCoaster Tycoon (and beforehand) games were written in Assembly language. I was writing games in assembly language back in the 80s and early 90s. Certainly if you wrote games for the Atari ST, Amiga or any of the 8-bit platforms you would've written it in assembler. Compilers just weren't efficient enough at producing the fastest code possible at the time.
- prodigal_erik 16y agoAlso, CPUs at the time were simple enough that you could just add up instruction timings and know how fast the code would run. But now you can get dramatic performance improvements by making assumptions about how today's microcoded superscalar pipelines happen to invisibly schedule instructions out-of-order, and compilers automate the required bookkeeping.
- msbarnett 16y agoRoller Coaster Tycoon came out in 1999. Superscalar pipelines were already the norm (the Pentium Pro had been out for nearly 5 years at that point).
- iuguy 16y agoThe Pentium Pro was not the average CPU for playing Roller Coast Tycoon though. Although in the process of writing this comment I found out that the P5 series was the first Superscalar processor and that Roller Coaster Tycoon needed at least a P90, so it may well have taken advantage of it.
- chipsy 16y agoIt's particularly odd because he was writing for DirectX/x86, and thus had lots of power compared to the contemporary console hardware. Wolf3D(1992) used C; Ultima 7(also 1992) used C++. RCT came out in 1999, when this transition was essentially complete, with the possible exception of a few holdout platforms, e.g, Game Boy Color. On the other hand, Sawyer did have some rationale to continue going all-ASM, since he had been building up the engine code over the course of the decade, and when he first made it for Transport Tycoon(1994), hand-optimizing the rendering code was probably the only way to achieve a smooth high-res isometric renderer.
- wccrawford 16y agoAlso, I know some programmers who generally program best if just left alone to do their job, instead of trying to get the 'team' to decide everything. Left to their own devices, they end up with the 'right'* answer in much less time than if forced to argue design with a team and then work with a team to implement it. I know others that work best in a team and definitely benefit from talking out the entire design beforehand, and then coding pieces of it together. So yes, there's a very good chance that those programmers who think they work better alone actually do work better alone. It's probably experience talking, and not just hubris. * (Yes, I know there's no 1 'right' answer. The answers they come up with are always as good as they get, though.)
- codebaobab 16y agoDan Ingalls, implementor of Smalltalk isn't on the list.
- JimmyRuska 16y agoGabest of mediaplayer classic, whoever that may be. Avery Lee of virtualdub.
- iuguy 16y agoI'm so surprised Fabrice Bellard is so far down. The guy is absolutely one of the greatest developers I've ever ever had the luxury of reviewing the code of. By comparison, DJB is a force of nature when it comes to programming, but reading his code can be a little difficult (try understanding qmail's source base as an example). I have to admit though, _why's is the most readable of all truly great code, despite the fact that it's at least mostly in ruby.
- mayank 16y agoAgreed, and if you're talking about an army, DJB is a wonderful example. Not only can he write iron code, but he can successfully sue the government when they try to restrict it, while representing himself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States That, and teaching a course where the class uncovers 44 Unix security holes is quite impressive: http://it.slashdot.org/story/04/12/15/2113202/DJB-Announces-44-Security-Holes-In-nix-Software http://it.slashdot.org/story/04/12/15/2113202/DJB-Announces-...
- jeff18 16y agoBasically every independent game developer.
- templaedhel 16y agohttp://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff nuff said.
- Joakal 16y agoFlavien Brebion, not quite famous but is making a highly anticipated sci-fi game. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Infinity_%28MMOG%29 https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Infinity_%28M...
- gregsadetsky 16y agoHow about X-Plane creator Austin Meyer?
- sriramk 16y agoDave Cutler. It's a bit of a shame that the world at large doesn't get to see his code in NT. It is by far the most gorgeous C code I've seen. In fact, in the beginning, there have been times when I used to look up his code just to feel inspired (think of it as 'code inspiration'). Getting to meet him and work in the same team as him for the last few years has definitely been the highlight of my Microsoft career. Also, my wife (HN username:arithmetic) will tell you that getting a autographed copy of Showstopper was one of the best gifts I've gotten her :)
- wglb 16y agoAnd that is not the whole of his career. If I am not mistaken, NT is the third os in which he has been the head dude: RSX-11/m, and VMS being the other two.
- sriramk 16y agoYup. He also wrote a compiler book in the 80s. He once gave me a mini-lecture on old architectures from the 70s and how 'we kids had it easy these days'. It was awesome, even if I didn't catch any of the content until he started talking about x86 :)
- wglb 16y agoCool. Do you recall the title of the book? I am unable to find any reference to it.
- ks 16y agoPerhaps this? http://www.amazon.com/dp/0932376193 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0932376193
- wglb 16y agoThanks much. That turns out to be one of the better engineered compilers, at least according to David Conroy (author of MicroEmacs, author of the first handful of compilers for Mark Williams, hardware engineer for DecTalk and who should be on this list).
- pom 16y agoMy answer was James Clark: he did groff, sgmls, expat, and important parts of the XML and Relax NG specs among others.
- ekidd 16y agoYes. James Clark's most impressive work was nsgmls, which was a correct and comprehensive SGML parser (one of the few that ever existed). The annotated SGML standard was 688 pages long, and it was still missing huge amounts of critical information. I know some truly amazing Lisp hackers—some of the most productive programmers I've ever met—who considered nsgmls an amazingly and slightly disturbing feat.
- nkassis 16y agoI posted it on the page but one guy some here might like: L. Peter Deutsch for writing the PDP-1 version of Lisp at the age 12 (he was the son of an MIT prof and was hanging out with MIT Hackers back in the 60s) he also wrote Ghostscript
- dws 16y agoAnd he wrote one of the first JIT code generators for Smalltalk-80 while at ParcPlace.
- dnsworks 16y agoWhat about Zed Shaw?
- sagarun 16y agoLennart Poettering - Creator of Avahi,pulseaudio, systemd http://0pointer.de/lennart/ http://0pointer.de/lennart/
- rxin 16y agoI believe Bill Joy has to make the list. From wikipedia: "Some of his most notable contributions were the vi editor, NFS, and csh. Joy's prowess as a computer programmer is legendary, with an oft-told anecdote that he wrote the vi editor in a weekend. Joy denies this assertion.[2] Joy's accomplishments have been sometimes exaggerated; Eric Schmidt, CEO of Novell at the time, inaccurately reported during an interview in PBS's documentary Nerds 2.0.1 that Joy had personally rewritten the BSD kernel in a weekend." "Joy was also a primary figure in the development of the SPARC microprocessors, the Java programming language, Jini / JavaSpaces and JXTA." "BBN had a big contract to implement TCP/IP, but their stuff didn't work, and Joy's grad student stuff worked. So they had this big meeting and this grad student in a T-shirt shows up, and they said, "How did you do this?" And Bill said, "It's very simple — you read the protocol and write the code."
- mkramlich 16y ago> "How did you do this?" And Bill said, "It's very simple — you read the protocol and write the code." Love it. Reminds me of the Feynman Algorithm mentioned here on HN a few days ago. Regarding how Feynman came up with so much brilliant, groundbreaking work, that the steps he supposedly followed were: 1. Write down the problem. 2. Think real hard. 3. Write down the solution.
- Create 16y agofabrice.bellard.free.fr - http://bellard.org/ http://bellard.org/
- khingebjerg 16y agoDon't know about famous, but this guy seems like a one-man-army-programmer. http://www.losethos.com/ http://www.losethos.com/
- l0nwlf 16y agoI will go with a real-life example. A person that I know of. Ishaan Chattopadhyaya IMO, not many outsiders know of him but he single-handedly rewrote MapQuest Search.
- hopeless 16y agoCasey seems to be the one-man programmer/sysadmin of Ravelry: http://codemonkey.ravelry.com/2011/02/12/ravelry-in-bullet-points/ http://codemonkey.ravelry.com/2011/02/12/ravelry-in-bullet-p...
- yankcrime 16y agoI'm sad to see that there's not been any mention of Geoff Crammond (Revs, The Sentinel, Stunt Car Racer, Formula One Grand Prix). He was singled out even 'back in the day' for being the ultimate one-man army when it came to game development.
- ashutoshm 16y agohttp://www.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/MythGeniusProgrammer.html http://www.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/MythGeniusProg...