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"Programmers have to work in a team if they really want to do anything of moderately large scale" I would disagree with that statement.
by Dilpil 18y ago
"Programmers have to work in a team if they really want to do anything of moderately large scale"
I would disagree with that statement.
- coliveira 18y agoYes, programming history has a few star programmers that implemented operating systems, editors, web sites, etc. The problem is that, in the end, they all had to work with a team to take that creation to the next level.
- kragen 18y agoL. Peter Deutsch, who is by anyone's measure one of history's greatest programmers, spent many years working on basically just GhostScript, basically by himself (code contributions he received were not up to his standards). He made a good living at it and has a substantial amount of savings as a result. I don't really have any idea whether that means US$2M or US$2B, though. Maybe he'll donate some of his savings to some charity and we'll get an idea of their scale. So I think GhostScript might demonstrate, or at least approximate, the limit of what one person working by himself can do. ("Greatest": he wrote approximately the second Lisp interpreter when he was 15; with Butler Lampson he wrote the QED editor, on which ed and thus vi are based; he invented JIT compilation; he did a bunch of stuff at PARC in the 1970s that I don't even know about; and he successfully competed with Adobe in the PostScript RIP market for decades.)