
Stackoverflow: Are there any famous one-man-army programmers? - DFectuoso
http://stackoverflow.com/q/529757/47846
======
sriramk
Dave Cutler.

It's a bit of a shame that the world at large doesn't get to see his code in
NT. It is by far the most gorgeous C code I've seen. In fact, in the
beginning, there have been times when I used to look up his code just to feel
inspired (think of it as 'code inspiration').

Getting to meet him and work in the same team as him for the last few years
has definitely been the highlight of my Microsoft career.

Also, my wife (HN username:arithmetic) will tell you that getting a
autographed copy of Showstopper was one of the best gifts I've gotten her :)

~~~
wglb
And that is not the whole of his career. If I am not mistaken, NT is the third
os in which he has been the head dude: RSX-11/m, and VMS being the other two.

~~~
sriramk
Yup. He also wrote a compiler book in the 80s. He once gave me a mini-lecture
on old architectures from the 70s and how 'we kids had it easy these days'. It
was awesome, even if I didn't catch any of the content until he started
talking about x86 :)

~~~
wglb
Cool.

Do you recall the title of the book? I am unable to find any reference to it.

~~~
ks
Perhaps this? <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0932376193>

~~~
wglb
Thanks much.

That turns out to be one of the better engineered compilers, at least
according to David Conroy (author of MicroEmacs, author of the first handful
of compilers for Mark Williams, hardware engineer for DecTalk and who should
be on this list).

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chops
I'm surprised to see Markus Alexej Persson (aka Notch) missing from that list
for Minecraft. Between doing the coding and art, he's demonstrated that he can
basically do it all.

~~~
cruise02
Instead of being surprised to see an answer missing, why not add the answer?

~~~
chops
Because I'd have to make an account to answer this one question, while I'm
already a member here at HN.

~~~
xiongchiamiov
There's not much to creating an account if you use OpenID. Two clicks from the
login page, IIRC.

~~~
Andys
Good spot to observe how OpenID doesn't make people any less likely to bother
logging in

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olalonde
> Chris Sawyer [...] RollerCoaster Tycoon [...] entire game was written in
> assembly language.

That is quite humbling to say the least.

~~~
iuguy
Really? Around the time of RollerCoaster Tycoon (and beforehand) games were
written in Assembly language. I was writing games in assembly language back in
the 80s and early 90s.

Certainly if you wrote games for the Atari ST, Amiga or any of the 8-bit
platforms you would've written it in assembler. Compilers just weren't
efficient enough at producing the fastest code possible at the time.

~~~
chipsy
It's particularly odd because he was writing for DirectX/x86, and thus had
lots of power compared to the contemporary console hardware. Wolf3D(1992) used
C; Ultima 7(also 1992) used C++. RCT came out in 1999, when this transition
was essentially complete, with the possible exception of a few holdout
platforms, e.g, Game Boy Color.

On the other hand, Sawyer did have some rationale to continue going all-ASM,
since he had been building up the engine code over the course of the decade,
and when he first made it for Transport Tycoon(1994), hand-optimizing the
rendering code was probably the only way to achieve a smooth high-res
isometric renderer.

~~~
iuguy
You raise a valid point - certainly for the Amiga 500 you knew you only had a
certain number of platforms and CPUs and you could even make snap judgements
like, "No-one's going to run Stunt Car Racer on a top-end Amiga 3000." -
thankfully cookie didn't and Stunt Car Racer was awesome regardless of
platform, but Mercenary on the other hand was never built with an 060/66
Blizzard board in mind and was impossible to play.

I think the PC world encouraged the use of higher level languages as waiting
for VBL's became more important than squeezing all the juice you could because
of the potential variations.

Thanks for your comment, it's inspired a new sense of respect for 486
progrmamers (25/33/50? SX, DX? - we can't worry about that, we have TIE
fighters to render!)

------
wccrawford
Also, I know some programmers who generally program best if just left alone to
do their job, instead of trying to get the 'team' to decide everything. Left
to their own devices, they end up with the 'right'* answer in much less time
than if forced to argue design with a team and then work with a team to
implement it.

I know others that work best in a team and definitely benefit from talking out
the entire design beforehand, and then coding pieces of it together.

So yes, there's a very good chance that those programmers who think they work
better alone actually do work better alone. It's probably experience talking,
and not just hubris.

* (Yes, I know there's no 1 'right' answer. The answers they come up with are always as good as they get, though.)

------
iuguy
I'm so surprised Fabrice Bellard is so far down. The guy is absolutely one of
the greatest developers I've ever ever had the luxury of reviewing the code
of.

By comparison, DJB is a force of nature when it comes to programming, but
reading his code can be a little difficult (try understanding qmail's source
base as an example). I have to admit though, _why's is the most readable of
all truly great code, despite the fact that it's at least mostly in ruby.

~~~
mayank
Agreed, and if you're talking about an _army_ , DJB is a wonderful example.
Not only can he write iron code, but he can successfully sue the government
when they try to restrict it, _while representing himself_ :
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States>

That, and teaching a course where the class uncovers 44 Unix security holes is
quite impressive: [http://it.slashdot.org/story/04/12/15/2113202/DJB-
Announces-...](http://it.slashdot.org/story/04/12/15/2113202/DJB-
Announces-44-Security-Holes-In-nix-Software)

~~~
deepu_256
Wow. Hearing about this guy for the first time. Inspiring ....

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jeff18
Basically every independent game developer.

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rxin
I believe Bill Joy has to make the list.

From wikipedia:

"Some of his most notable contributions were the vi editor, NFS, and csh.
Joy's prowess as a computer programmer is legendary, with an oft-told anecdote
that he wrote the vi editor in a weekend. Joy denies this assertion.[2] Joy's
accomplishments have been sometimes exaggerated; Eric Schmidt, CEO of Novell
at the time, inaccurately reported during an interview in PBS's documentary
Nerds 2.0.1 that Joy had personally rewritten the BSD kernel in a weekend."

"Joy was also a primary figure in the development of the SPARC
microprocessors, the Java programming language, Jini / JavaSpaces and JXTA."

"BBN had a big contract to implement TCP/IP, but their stuff didn't work, and
Joy's grad student stuff worked. So they had this big meeting and this grad
student in a T-shirt shows up, and they said, "How did you do this?" And Bill
said, "It's very simple — you read the protocol and write the code."

~~~
mkramlich
> "How did you do this?" And Bill said, "It's very simple — you read the
> protocol and write the code."

Love it. Reminds me of the Feynman Algorithm mentioned here on HN a few days
ago. Regarding how Feynman came up with so much brilliant, groundbreaking
work, that the steps he supposedly followed were:

1\. Write down the problem.

2\. Think real hard.

3\. Write down the solution.

------
nkassis
I posted it on the page but one guy some here might like:

L. Peter Deutsch for writing the PDP-1 version of Lisp at the age 12 (he was
the son of an MIT prof and was hanging out with MIT Hackers back in the 60s)
he also wrote Ghostscript

~~~
dws
And he wrote one of the first JIT code generators for Smalltalk-80 while at
ParcPlace.

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codebaobab
Dan Ingalls, implementor of Smalltalk isn't on the list.

------
pom
My answer was James Clark: he did groff, sgmls, expat, and important parts of
the XML and Relax NG specs among others.

~~~
ekidd
Yes. James Clark's most impressive work was nsgmls, which was a correct and
comprehensive SGML parser (one of the few that ever existed). The annotated
SGML standard was 688 pages long, and it was still missing huge amounts of
critical information.

I know some truly amazing Lisp hackers—some of the most productive programmers
I've ever met—who considered nsgmls an amazingly and slightly disturbing feat.

------
l0nwlf
I will go with a real-life example. A person that I know of.

Ishaan Chattopadhyaya IMO, not many outsiders know of him but he single-
handedly rewrote MapQuest Search.

------
templaedhel
<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff> nuff said.

------
gregsadetsky
How about X-Plane creator Austin Meyer?

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yankcrime
I'm sad to see that there's not been any mention of Geoff Crammond (Revs, The
Sentinel, Stunt Car Racer, Formula One Grand Prix). He was singled out even
'back in the day' for being the ultimate one-man army when it came to game
development.

------
Joakal
Flavien Brebion, not quite famous but is making a highly anticipated sci-fi
game.
[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Infinity_%28M...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Infinity_%28MMOG%29)

------
hopeless
Casey seems to be the one-man programmer/sysadmin of Ravelry:
[http://codemonkey.ravelry.com/2011/02/12/ravelry-in-
bullet-p...](http://codemonkey.ravelry.com/2011/02/12/ravelry-in-bullet-
points/)

------
sagarun
Lennart Poettering - Creator of Avahi,pulseaudio, systemd
<http://0pointer.de/lennart/>

------
JimmyRuska
Gabest of mediaplayer classic, whoever that may be. Avery Lee of virtualdub.

------
ashutoshm
[http://www.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/MythGeniusProg...](http://www.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/MythGeniusProgrammer.html)

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khingebjerg
Don't know about famous, but this guy seems like a one-man-army-programmer.
<http://www.losethos.com/>

------
Create
fabrice.bellard.free.fr - <http://bellard.org/>

