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Ranking programmers is as dumb as ranking musicians. Carmack is great but you can't really say he's better than say some guy you've never heard of who wrote a

Ranking programmers is as dumb as ranking musicians. Carmack is great but you can't really say he's better than say some guy you've never heard of who wrote a bunch of absolutely brilliant algorithms inside a missile defense system and it's all super secret. Or someone who did amazing work on a compiler Carmack used or brilliant work in an OS kernel that you're never going to know about, or some AI code, or something deep within a stock exchange's platform. Carmack's perceived greatness is elevated because almost 100% of what he has worked on is directly visible to the average consumer.

deleted 3y ago
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Eisenstein 3y ago
> Ranking programmers is as dumb as ranking musicians. If a musician had a noticeable impact on culture and was prolific, I don't see why we can't put them in a bracket of [in top #]. The ranking is really just to illustrate my respect for his work, accomplishments, insightful communications, and continued relevance as well as impact on my life and those around me. You can call that 'dumb' if you like, but I am human just like you and am not above placing some people's accomplishments above those of others.
- deleted 3y ago
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- saltcured 3y ago
  To me, Carmack equates more to an engineer who designed wild equipment used by sound engineers and musicians. Aside from Torvalds or Wozniak, I think most programmers are unsung, regardless of how much their products impact the world. Most programmers are quickly forgotten if they were ever known in the first place. In terms of cultural impact, think of the programmers behind our PC or mobile operating systems, major consumer app categories like spreadsheets, word processors, photo or video editing, etc. Of course some nerds of computing history can cite folks behind all these, but it is niche trivia to most of the population. It also seems like an era coming to a close where a solo programmer can deliver an impactful product. Who gets the credit instead? Usually an executive or entrepreneur gets the credit. Sometimes this person programmed early on, but often they either transitioned to management or started there and other programmers were responsible for delivering the product we eventually know.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    > It also seems like an era coming to a close where a solo programmer can deliver an impactful product. This is true but you have to look at it differently. There are generally two ways of looking at history: the 'great man'[0] theory, or the 'of the times' theory. If you look at it one way Woz and Carmack and Torvalds and the others were instrumental in shaping their surroundings and without those specific people we would have lost out on basically the entire technological world as we know it. If you look at it another way, they were inevitable -- the times were such that it was bound to happen (or at least extremely likely) because of a great confluence of events that could never be arranged or predicted, and if Woz had electrocuted himself making the Apple I power supply module then someone else would have done something similar around the same time and we end up at the same spot (but Steve Jobs becomes a moderately successful Bay Area Benz dealer and we all use Blackberry phones with physical keyboards in 2023). The era of an individual engineer or programmer making a paradigm shifting breakthrough in his or her basement may be over, but that just means the times have shifted into another dynamic. What that is can not be predicted, but if we do survive the oncoming crises upon us and somehow also never end up turning the planet into smoldering radioactive ash over a shipping lane dispute or something, there will be a time when such a person can be expected to emerge and do it again. [0] excuse the masculine nature of this terminology, but unfortunately that is what it is called, though I haven't formally studied history in a while and it could have changed
JadeNB 3y ago
> Ranking programmers is as dumb as ranking musicians. But also as much fun for people with appropriately specialized interests, so it'll probably keep happening.
jonhohle 3y ago
Coincidentally (or not), Carmack started Armadillo Aerospace and was working rocket control and navigation systems. So…
hyperman1 3y ago
Carmack's main superpowers seem to be tons of hard work, not raw intelligence 1) Perseverance and focus: He kept rewriting the quake renderer, pushing it faster and better, where other people had long ago settled for a lesser variant or given up. 2) Try everything, even the stupid ideas. When he wrote quake, the wisdom was that the FPU was way to slow for a game. He managed to do z-divisions for blocks of 16 pixels on it, while the integer code spit out the pixels. 3) Attention to detail. The doom span renderer was sub pixel precise, which was pretty unique for its time. It looked better in a hard to define way. 4) Code quality. Doom and quake are very readable, very portable and heavily documented. The average 1-person codebase tends to be messy and undocumented, as nobody else ever takes a look. On the other hand, plenty of fixmes in there. It was unabashedly special cased where he could get away with it. 5) He consumed whatever idea he could get. BSPs were an obscure research trick before he took them and ran with it. He had huge holes in his 3D knowledge when writing doom, as he admits himself. He didn't care until quake forced him to level up. But he could look in the mirror, say he needed to do better, and learn the extra things when he had to. I don't know if Carmack is that much smarter than the average HNer, but he surely works a lot harder. And that's an even better compliment, in my book
- at-fates-hands 3y ago
  Not sure where I read it, but someone writing about the history of DOOM basically said John was a machine and the machine ran on Diet Coke and pizza. As long as he had both, he could remain in the zone indefinitely, which is pretty crazy when think about all the things he accomplished that you listed.
  - baal80spam 3y ago
    > Not sure where I read it, but someone writing about the history of DOOM basically said John was a machine and the machine ran on Diet Coke and pizza. I'm pretty sure I've read it in "Masters of Doom".

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Eisenstein 3y ago

> Ranking programmers is as dumb as ranking musicians. If a musician had a noticeable impact on culture and was prolific, I don't see why we can't put them in a bracket of [in top #]. The ranking is really just to illustrate my respect for his work, accomplishments, insightful communications, and continued relevance as well as impact on my life and those around me. You can call that 'dumb' if you like, but I am human just like you and am not above placing some people's accomplishments above those of others.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
saltcured 3y ago
To me, Carmack equates more to an engineer who designed wild equipment used by sound engineers and musicians. Aside from Torvalds or Wozniak, I think most programmers are unsung, regardless of how much their products impact the world. Most programmers are quickly forgotten if they were ever known in the first place. In terms of cultural impact, think of the programmers behind our PC or mobile operating systems, major consumer app categories like spreadsheets, word processors, photo or video editing, etc. Of course some nerds of computing history can cite folks behind all these, but it is niche trivia to most of the population. It also seems like an era coming to a close where a solo programmer can deliver an impactful product. Who gets the credit instead? Usually an executive or entrepreneur gets the credit. Sometimes this person programmed early on, but often they either transitioned to management or started there and other programmers were responsible for delivering the product we eventually know.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  > It also seems like an era coming to a close where a solo programmer can deliver an impactful product. This is true but you have to look at it differently. There are generally two ways of looking at history: the 'great man'[0] theory, or the 'of the times' theory. If you look at it one way Woz and Carmack and Torvalds and the others were instrumental in shaping their surroundings and without those specific people we would have lost out on basically the entire technological world as we know it. If you look at it another way, they were inevitable -- the times were such that it was bound to happen (or at least extremely likely) because of a great confluence of events that could never be arranged or predicted, and if Woz had electrocuted himself making the Apple I power supply module then someone else would have done something similar around the same time and we end up at the same spot (but Steve Jobs becomes a moderately successful Bay Area Benz dealer and we all use Blackberry phones with physical keyboards in 2023). The era of an individual engineer or programmer making a paradigm shifting breakthrough in his or her basement may be over, but that just means the times have shifted into another dynamic. What that is can not be predicted, but if we do survive the oncoming crises upon us and somehow also never end up turning the planet into smoldering radioactive ash over a shipping lane dispute or something, there will be a time when such a person can be expected to emerge and do it again. [0] excuse the masculine nature of this terminology, but unfortunately that is what it is called, though I haven't formally studied history in a while and it could have changed

JadeNB 3y ago

> Ranking programmers is as dumb as ranking musicians. But also as much fun for people with appropriately specialized interests, so it'll probably keep happening.

jonhohle 3y ago

Coincidentally (or not), Carmack started Armadillo Aerospace and was working rocket control and navigation systems. So…

hyperman1 3y ago

Carmack's main superpowers seem to be tons of hard work, not raw intelligence 1) Perseverance and focus: He kept rewriting the quake renderer, pushing it faster and better, where other people had long ago settled for a lesser variant or given up. 2) Try everything, even the stupid ideas. When he wrote quake, the wisdom was that the FPU was way to slow for a game. He managed to do z-divisions for blocks of 16 pixels on it, while the integer code spit out the pixels. 3) Attention to detail. The doom span renderer was sub pixel precise, which was pretty unique for its time. It looked better in a hard to define way. 4) Code quality. Doom and quake are very readable, very portable and heavily documented. The average 1-person codebase tends to be messy and undocumented, as nobody else ever takes a look. On the other hand, plenty of fixmes in there. It was unabashedly special cased where he could get away with it. 5) He consumed whatever idea he could get. BSPs were an obscure research trick before he took them and ran with it. He had huge holes in his 3D knowledge when writing doom, as he admits himself. He didn't care until quake forced him to level up. But he could look in the mirror, say he needed to do better, and learn the extra things when he had to. I don't know if Carmack is that much smarter than the average HNer, but he surely works a lot harder. And that's an even better compliment, in my book

at-fates-hands 3y ago
Not sure where I read it, but someone writing about the history of DOOM basically said John was a machine and the machine ran on Diet Coke and pizza. As long as he had both, he could remain in the zone indefinitely, which is pretty crazy when think about all the things he accomplished that you listed.
- baal80spam 3y ago
  > Not sure where I read it, but someone writing about the history of DOOM basically said John was a machine and the machine ran on Diet Coke and pizza. I'm pretty sure I've read it in "Masters of Doom".