

Ask HN: Who is the best programmer in the world right now? - kayoone

I know that a question like that does not make too much sense, but i still think it would make for some interesting discussions.<p>Inspired by the same question on Quora:
http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Computer-Programming&#x2F;Who-is-the-best-programmer-in-the-world-right-now<p>Who do you think is the best programmer in the world right now and why ?
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atmosx
That's easy, the best programmer in the world, right now and forever, is
Mel[1].

[1]
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.jokes/k2JVKQzJSp...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.jokes/k2JVKQzJSpY)

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pierre
I don't know if there is any 'best programmer in the world' and if such a
concept make sense.

But some programmers seems to be very productive, in top of my head:

Fabrice Bellard ([http://bellard.org/](http://bellard.org/)) : He create a lot
of high impact project including FFMPEG

John Carmack
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack)):
Video game legend that create DOOM

Josh Parnell ([http://joshparnell.com/](http://joshparnell.com/)) : Young
programmer developing outstanding games alone.

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gjvc
I'm going to rise to the bait and nominate Jon Skeet
[http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-
skeet](http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet), because his answers
have helped so many others by the leaderboard at
[http://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=Reputation&filter=all](http://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=Reputation&filter=all)

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factorialboy
If he was the best, he would be too busy to participate on SO ... =p

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raphinou
I find Fabrice Bellard's work remarkable and impressive

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Im_Talking
This is like asking who makes the world's best coffee.

I think there are physicists working on weather, LHC, astrophysics problems
which probably blow-away any of the commercial guys.

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nhayden
I think the people behind TrueCrypt deserve some recognition - they solved an
extremely difficult problem much better than it had ever been solved before.
It's unfortunate they never got Windows 8 compatibility before shutting down.

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bluerail
Linus torvalds...?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds)

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neduma
I guess this is very subjective. Github should do some analysis based on code
commits and should post top ranking programmers.

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alexknvl
How do you measure "bestness" exactly? Is it measured in the number of daily
GitHub/BitBucket/whatever commits or in the number of stackoverflow answers?
Or is it measured in the overall impact on the world (which is hard to
quantify by itself, btw)?

Define "the best", and it won't take much time to figure out who it is.

P.S. Personally, my choice would be Paul Graham (measured by the number of his
essays I read and liked).

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mc_hammer
ill rise to the bait also and nominate john carmack. i think its probably him
or an unknown to me developer from the quake/unreal engines.. just because
they optimized the best engines and so many millions of $ were made from their
minutes spent coding. also could be gaben or a linux/win kernel dev... maybe?

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zikzikzik
The nice guy ;) behind linux and git.

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J_Darnley
The people working on LibreSSL?

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justplay
ruby on rails fan guy here and i adore what ddh has created.

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arzugula
Aaron Patterson continues to make Rails awesome (check his RailsConf 2014
keynote). To me (and a lot of folks I know) he is the most inspiring
programmer today.

His positive attitude, dedication to making software better, and continuous
stream of hilarious tweets are unparalleled.

~~~
justplay
Fully agree. Contributors like Aaron patterson and jose valim are the
accelerator which keeps the Rails project healthy today.

I rather say that _I_ adore DDH just because he has entrepreneur, hacker and
developer which i want to became in near future.

Furthermore, i very much inspired with Aaron Patterson peepcode screenshot.

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idoescompooters
Steve Wozniak!

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n0body
me, because i said so

