

Ask HN: Who is the best programmer in the world? - huherto


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nudge
I think there must be very few examples of groups of things for which 'best'
is a useful word.

What's the best car? What's the best country? Who's the best singer? What's
the best beer? Which is the best musical instrument? Who's the best ever
artist? Who's the best ever scientist?

As a step towards a more answerable version of your question, how about this:
What are some orderings by which we can evaluate programmers? Who comes at the
top of those? Who comes at or near the top of several?

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ecommando
That's like asking "Who's the best prostitute?" It's totally subjective.

As an example, for 3d game engine design, clearly Tim Sweeney of Epic Games is
one of the top developers, if not THE top developer, in the field today.
TODAY.

That said, I wouldn't hire him to write an operating system.

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gdulli
I can't imagine an internal view of programming that's so much more
quantitative than qualitative that it could lead to forming a question like
this.

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larrykubin
John Carmack

~~~
arn
Carmack was the first to come to my mind in terms of individual programmer
notoriety.

In his day, he was probably considered by many to be the best programmer in
his field. Part of that had to do with pushing limits of the hardware at the
time and also shipping code.

With the speediness of computers now, this sort of raw optimization is less
celebrated. Also, games and other projects have tended to become massive team
efforts, harder to pinpoint to one great programmer.

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brudgers
Best measured by dollars - Bill Gates.

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pbhjpbhj
> _Best [programmer] measured by dollars - Bill Gates._

How many of those dollars did he earn actually programming.

Don't get me wrong I think he has been an awesome business man I just don't
know how good a programmer he really is. Indeed he may be a most brilliant
programmer but still have not really worked as a programmer in earning his
fortune?

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huherto
I know there is no answer for this. But, I am looking for good stories of
people that you admire, not only for having created big companies but also for
the code they've written.

~~~
benkant
You probably should have asked that question rather than the one you did.

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pestaa
John Skeet, provided Stack Overflow reputation is creditable.

