Ask HN: Who is the best computer programmer of all times?
xqb64 · 4 days ago
My personal favorite is Fabrice Bellard.
10 comments
xqb64 · 4 days ago
My personal favorite is Fabrice Bellard.
10 comments
jleyank · 4 days ago
You'd have to come up with the criteria for "best" but as an old hacker, "from MIT or Bell Labs" comes to mind as where to look. Maybe some of their spinoffs, but those sites did amazing things with basically nothing.
xqb64 · 4 days ago
Yeah. Andy Tanenbaum described studying at MIT as "drinking from a fire hose". Do we have someone who both got their degree from MIT and worked at Bell Labs? That'd be an interesting combo.
bdangubic · 4 days ago
Mike Evanston
rstagi · 4 days ago
"best" is a relative term, but in terms of technology we all use every day I would say either Linus Torvalds or Jeff Dean are up there among the best for sure
xqb64 · 4 days ago
Sort of, the one who, when left stranded on a desert island, would make a CPU out of sand, write software for it, including the entire TCP/IP stack, and email someone to come get them.
chairmansteve · 4 days ago
D. Richard Hipp is up there for me.
I love the minimalism of his programs, SQLLite and Fossil. Also involved in Tcl, my favourite language.
__patchbit__ · 4 days ago
RMS
boho_derogatory · 4 days ago
In case you weren't being ironic, his C code was journeyman-like in the 80s and positively atrocious by modern standards.
dlcarrier · 4 days ago
That's far too subjective of a question to have a specific answer, but obviously it's Melvin Kaye: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
genxy · 4 days ago
You will never know, for all they do is delete and refactor.
LocalH · 4 days ago
Any of the top coders from the major demoscenes.
jerhewet · 4 days ago
Fabrice Bellard.
smallduck · 4 days ago
Nasir Gebelli. Wrote Apple 2 games by dictating bytes typed into the mini-assembler, went on to write/co-design the early Final Fantasy titles. Legend.