There's a story on the front page right now about writing a Haskell compiler from scratch. I don't mean to be an ass, but I will: there are a lot of programmer

There's a story on the front page right now about writing a Haskell compiler from scratch. I don't mean to be an ass, but I will: there are a lot of programmers that would effectively never be able to do this. We're asking about if 10X programmers exist? I'm saying even infinity X programmers exist. I think a lot of this depends on the task at hand--some tasks are straightforward, others require a lot of, for lack of a better word, "invention", and that's where the difference lies. If the task is "web front end to a database", that task is understood and executed on a level that there probably aren't many optimizations an individual can do. It's difficult to imagine someone implementing ten web front ends to databases in the time it takes an average programmer to do one. On the other hand, if the task is "create a competitive AI to play the game of go", well, I think that there's a ton of invention required there, and an individual could in fact make a 10x difference.