The World's Best Living Programmers

itwbennett (1594911) writes "How do you measure success? If it's by Stack Overflow reputation, Google engineer Jon Skeet is the world's best programmer. If it's winning programming competitions, Gennady Korotkevich or Petr Mitrechev might be your pick. But what about Linus Torvalds? Or Richard Stallman? Or Donald Knuth? ITworld's Phil Johnson has rounded up a list of what just might be the world's top 14 programmers alive today."

Comments

Re:No exhaustive..

[ShanghaiBill]

For others that are too busy to click through the slideshow, here is the list:

Jon Skeet : Legendary Stack Overflow contributor
Gennady Korotkevich : Competitive programming prodigy
Linus Torvalds : Creator of Linux
Jeff Dean : The brains behind Google search indexing
John Carmack : Creator of Doom
Richard Stallman : Creator of Emacs, GCC
Petr Mitrechev : One of the top competitive programmers of all time
Fabrice Bellard : Creator of QEMU
Doug Cutting : Creator of Lucene
Donald Knuth : Author of The Art of Computer Programming
Anders Hejlsberg : Creator of Turbo Pascal
Ken Thompson : Creator of Unix
Adam D'Angelo : Co-founder of Quora
Sanjay Ghemawat : Key Google architect

Re:Github Followers

[Megol]

Being a good programmer is orthogonal with being a good manager so... why should one count management skills?

Torvalds is a good programmer, but really far from the best out there.

I would include Bill Joy on the list

[twasserman]

BSD Unix, vi editor, Sun Microsystems....

A better list than expected

[damn_registrars]

I'm just impressed that neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg were included. Most people who don't understand programming include one - or both - of them when building a list of "top programmers" even though neither are particularly outstanding programmers.

damned multi-page

[danbob999]

Jon Skeet Main claim to fame: Legendary Stack Overflow contributor
Gennady Korotkevich Main claim to fame: Competitive programming prodigy
Linus Torvalds Main claim to fame: Creator of Linux
Jeff Dean Main claim to fame: The brains behind Google search indexing
John Carmack Main claim to fame: Creator of Doom
Richard Stallman Main claim to fame: Creator of Emacs, GCC
Petr Mitrechev Main claim to fame: One of the top competitive programmers of all time
Fabrice Bellard Main claim to fame: Creator of QEMU
Doug Cutting Main claim to fame: Creator of Lucene
Donald Knuth Main claim to fame: Author of The Art of Computer Programming
Anders Hejlsberg Main claim to fame: Creator of Turbo Pascal
Ken Thompson Main claim to fame: Creator of Unix
Adam D'Angelo Main claim to fame: Co-founder of Quora
Sanjay Ghemawat Main claim to fame: Key Google architect

False. Einstein had a PhD from U. Zurich, top grad

[raymorris]

Just FYI, that's quite false. Einstein passed his Matura (high school graduation exam), then attended Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zürich, where he got top grades in math and physics and earned his teaching degree. He did his PhD at University of Zürich. Alfred Kleiner, Professor of Experimental Physics, was his adviser for his thesis "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions" Kleiner didn't need to advise Einstein much - his previous paper, "Conclusions from the Capillarity Phenomena" had already been published in the prestigious "Annalen der Physik" (Annals of Physics).

Re:No exhaustive..

[RavenLrD20k]

Do we know who exactly came up with the concept for Donkey Kong?

Actually, yes we do. Donkey Kong was the first project by Shigeru Miyamoto. In fact, this was also the first appearance of Miyamoto's Mario character that has been continually reused ever since.