I'm not sure I can name truly great hackers, but I absolutely know very good ones and sorta bad ones.
Here's what I mean by sorta bad. They are very smart people, they know the language, they can code and then some. They can work out very complex stuff, super complex algorithms.
But when working on a large project, over time they slowly start to wrap them selves up in such as a way as to quickly hit a wall of frustration. Their productivity drops 10 fold, and it's crawling on broken shards of glass from then on.
The other type of hacker, initially is indistinguishable from the first. Except that whey they work on very large systems, they seem to be able to almost smell where the code base is going.
They are able to keep a large architecture in mind, continually adjust it and adjust their code. Most importantly it seems they have a great intuition about which frustrations are worth pushing through and which you should go around of.
It's that kid of code foresight that great hackers have.
> they have a great intuition about which frustrations are worth pushing through
I agree that keeping a global view while working on the local is a great ability to have, and a lack of it will create nightmarish frustrations as projects become larger. But you're saying that great hackers still have frustrations, which is what I took issue with. Your "mediocre" hacker also seems to be extremely capable, when working in the local.
Here's what I mean by sorta bad. They are very smart people, they know the language, they can code and then some. They can work out very complex stuff, super complex algorithms.
But when working on a large project, over time they slowly start to wrap them selves up in such as a way as to quickly hit a wall of frustration. Their productivity drops 10 fold, and it's crawling on broken shards of glass from then on.
The other type of hacker, initially is indistinguishable from the first. Except that whey they work on very large systems, they seem to be able to almost smell where the code base is going.
They are able to keep a large architecture in mind, continually adjust it and adjust their code. Most importantly it seems they have a great intuition about which frustrations are worth pushing through and which you should go around of.
It's that kid of code foresight that great hackers have.