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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."
.. since I'm not in it.
I think I have to contest that. Last semester I got straight As in both "Principles of programming languages" as well as "Algorithm Engineering".
You only know if you get to see their code, and/or if they are a public figure.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you go by Github followers, Linus is pretty up-there. Linus and Stallman aren't great just for their programming abilities; their capability to manage their projects so effectively is a huge factor in their success.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'd argue Chris Sawyer, the programmer behind the original Rollercoaster Tycoon. The entire game was written in Assembly, and works on pretty much anything to this day without needing an emulator or any real fixes. Second place goes to Toady, the programmer of Dwarf Fortress, for singlehandedly making a game that goes into more detail than it should ever have reason to and still works most of the time.
Carmack, as far as I'm aware, was behind the horrible "update" of Doom 3 that released on Steam a few years ago, which wouldn't run on fully half the machines of the people who bought it. He was also behind Rage, which was a notorious crashfest.
Stack Overflow reputation indicates that you're a 1337 documentation writer, not necessarily that you know how to program.
BSD Unix, vi editor, Sun Microsystems....
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.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I thought I'd get that in before too many other people do. I have better justification than most, as I *am* Jon Skeet. I saw the list yesterday, and we've been gently laughing about it at work.
Somewhere, the difference between fame and accomplishments has been lost. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a bad coder. I'm pretty knowledgeable about C# as a language, although details of writing *applications* in C# is a different matter. I'm pretty good at expressing technical concepts, and that's really useful in various contexts (Stack Overflow, books, screencasts, and of course work). But none of these are a patch on what some of the others on the list have accomplished.
As a Googler, I know a *bit* about what Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat have done - and it's obvious I'm not in the same league. The code I'm probably proudest of is Noda Time (my .NET date/time library) which has a few thousand users, if that. I hope I've had an impact everywhere I've worked, but it just isn't on the same scale as many of the other members of the list (let alone the many thousands of other notable programmers).
It's pretty clear I'm not actually on the list because of my coding skills - it's just due to Stack Overflow reputation. That indicates *something*, but it's definitely not the kind of measure you'd sensibly use to compare two programmers. Just as I'm proud of Noda Time, I'm proud of being able to help a lot of people on Stack Overflow - but I'm not under the delusion that even that's on the same level of impact as an awful lot of other coders.
For what it's worth, if I could substitute one other name for mine, it would be Eric Lippert. I'm not sure he's really be in the "top 14" or even whether that's meaningful - but I'd say he's at least *more* worthy of being there than I am.
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).
I noticed that the guy who wrote their slideshow code wasn't on the list.
The problem is that you were interviewing him for a job working with "Clipper", which he had almost no experience in.
If you had asked about adjusting the settings on his "#3 Clipper", which allowed him to produce anything from centimetre long shag to a 1 mm buzz cut, then you would have been amazed at how much he knew.
Forget the arguments about who should or should not be on the list. I can't take seriously a list of the best programmers when they picked 14 and not a power of 2.