
Ask HN: Which programmer do you look up to? - kotrunga
Which programmer do you look up to? And why?<p>Were they a mentor? Someone you didn&#x27;t even meet, but were inspired by?<p>What did you learn from them that you can share with us?
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segmondy
Thousands, too many to name. If you read lots of code and books, you will be
humbled at many brilliant folks that are out there.

Peter Norvig - Checkout his page, and his books PPIA, AIMA

Sandi Metz - Watch her talks

Rich Hickey - Watch his talks

Raymond Hettinger - Watch his live coding sections

Brian Kernighan - read "The Pratice of Programming"

Richard O'Keefe - read "The Craft of Prolog"

John Carmack - The master of constraints and doing more by doing less

Jan Weilemaker - maintainer of SWI-Prolog, read the code

Linux Linus - His stubborness and meaniness has kept Linux together, if he was
too passive, the kernel would have been a mess. Design by committe rarely
works, someone gotta own it. He owns it.

OpenBSD Theo - Unix systems are better secure because of Theo's stubbornness,
lots of branches end up incorporating changes that started from OpenBSD.

TJ Holowaychuk - I think he writes 10,000 lines of code a day

PHP Nikita Popov - The kid is brilliant

Anthony Minessale of Freeswitch

Moxie Marlinspike - the guy that brought us signal

Kyle Kingsbury aka Aphyr, checkout Jepsen, checkout his clojure tutorial.

Sergio Moreira, Nagra - famous PSX Hacker

~~~
bhoeting
I've never heard of Raymond Hettinger before but I'm currently watching one of
his videos [1] and it's amazing. Thanks for sharing your list, I'll definitely
look up some more of these people.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSGv2VnC0go](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSGv2VnC0go)

~~~
Lordarminius
All I can say is wow! Any equivalent videos of ruby programmers ? Just found
this by Sandi Metz for anyone interested:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJjHfa5yxlU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJjHfa5yxlU)

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mindcrime
Well, Linux Torvalds would be an inspiration, definitely. To start from
basically nothing and build Linux into what it's become, is no small feat (of
course he had help, but that doesn't detract from the accomplishment).

Other inspirations are a lot of the standard "greats" of the field: Rob Pike,
Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrupp, Brian Kernighan, Marvin Minsky, John
McCarthy, Richard Stevens, Nicholas Wirth, Edsger Dijkstra, Charles Simonyi,
etc.

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MiddleEndian
Tarn Adams, the creator of Dwarf Fortress.

He hasn't revolutionized programming itself or anything but he works on one
project indefinitely and lives off donations. Only works on features he finds
interesting.

He lives an ideal life for a programmer in my opinion.

------
blt
A senior dev in a company where I used to work. Helped me break out of
architecture astronautism. Always got work done really quickly with simple
code, no fancy tricks. 10x developer isn't real but this guy was probably 2 or
3x. Maintained a partial Linux build of our officially Windows only product
due to personal ideology. And was really humble and friendly.

------
ekr
I see Daniel Bernstein hasn't been mentioned, but looking through his
software, not many can match his track record of (seemingly) bug-free C code.
In any case, he's a mathematician and it shows.

Since learning about his patricia tree implementation (or rather, crit-bit
tree), i've been using it in a lot of projects, and again, very clean and
beautiful implementation of an efficient data structure.

So yes, his work (among that of many others) has been a source of inspiration
for me.

------
bhoeting
Gary Bernhardt. He does a great job at teaching Vim/Bash/Git workflow in his
screencasts, which is typically something that's hard to learn on your own. I
remember my mind getting blown when he did this in vim `:nmap ,t :w\|:!clear
&& ruby %<cr>` (if you don't use vim, this remaps comma-t to run the current
ruby file you're editing). I still use that little trick all the time and it
always amuses my friends.

------
michaelsbradley
David Harel[1], the inventor of Statecharts notation.

“If asked about the lessons to be learned from the statecharts story, I would
definitely put tool support for executability and experience in real-world use
at the top of the list. Too much computer science research on languages,
methodologies, and semantics never finds its way into the real world, even in
the long term, because these two issues do not get sufficient priority. One of
the most interesting aspects of this story is the fact that the work was not
done in an academic tower, inventing something and trying to push it down the
throats of real-world engineers. It was done by going into the lion’s den,
working with the people in industry. This is something I would not hesitate to
recommend to young researchers; in order to affect the real world, one must go
there and roll up one’s sleeves. One secret is to try to get a handle on the
thought processes of the engineers doing the real work and who will ultimately
use these ideas and tools. In my case, they were the avionics engineers, and
when I do biological modeling, they are biologists. If what you come up with
does not jibe with how they think, they will not use it. It’s that simple.”[2]

[1]
[http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~harel/papers.html](http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~harel/papers.html)

[2]
[http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~harel/papers/Statecharts.H...](http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~harel/papers/Statecharts.History.CACM.pdf)

------
roschdal
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack)

------
EliRivers
Greenblatt and Gosper and Stallman back when he was competing with Symbolics.
Giants of yesteryear. Whenever I get sick of it all, I read Levy's "Hackers"
again and come away inspired.

------
chatmasta
For me what's impressive is when someone builds a product that becomes so
successful it takes on a life of its own. Examples:

(redis) antirez (redis) - Beautiful product, elegant codebase, thriving
ecosystem. Amazing work for one person (obviously many more people are
involved now, but just getting a product to the point of creating an ecosystem
is impressive)

(docker) shykes, jpetazzo and the rest of the docker team

(react) Pete Hunt, one of the original creators of react (I'm sure others were
involved, but I met this guy years back in SF, he probably doesn't remember -
but he came off as quite smart)

(ffmpeg, qemu) fabrice bellard - Mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the guy
is an absolute beast.

(hashicorp) Mitchell Hasimoto - The best example of a 10x programmer I've ever
seen, but also great product sense. Every hashicorp product is well built and
it's emerging as a nice ecosystem.

(bitcoin) Satoshi - come on. Obviously.

(ethereum) Vitalik Buterin - I was skeptical of ethereum at first but I've
been really impressed by Vitalik and the team's dedication - they did a great
job launching a product and building an ecosystem around it (<insert
criticisms of solidity>)

(Tor) Roger Dingledine and Paul Syverson - Tor. Visionary, world changing
product and a strong community.

(javascript) brandon eich - Original creator of JS

(go) Rob Pike - go

(other languages): DHH (rails), Yukihiro Matsumoto (ruby), Guido von Rossum
(python), Resmus Lerdorf (PHP, believe it or not)

(the obvious): Linus Torvalds (linux, git), John Carmack (doom, quake, oculus)

(the kings): Zuckerberg, Gates

(the graybeards): kernighan, ritchie, thompson, knuth

(games): notch (minecraft), Sid Meier (civ)

------
prudhvis
Fabrice Bellard

~~~
hb3b
I came here looking for Fabrice to be mentioned.

[http://www.valleytalk.org/wp-
content/uploads/2010/11/Fabrice...](http://www.valleytalk.org/wp-
content/uploads/2010/11/FabriceBellard.pdf)

------
Francute
Surprisingly, at least for me, i don't see here Robert C. Martin, Kent Beck or
Alan Key...

Maybe they are old, and not the bussiness-succesfull-type but they are still
Gods for me in the academic side. They can clarify a lot of things most people
think they understood, or worst, i tought i understood.

Why? For me? Because the power they have modeling, the experience they
accumulated in a lot of areas, how they move checking metrics and not only by
what they feel or their instinct. And of course, because of the power of their
ideas which made them famous.

You dont have to agree them 100% of the time. Of course not. But when you
don't agree, check that twice, and check again after some years of earning
knowledge and experience too. They deserve that.

------
muzani
Paul Graham - basically I love reading 100% of what he writes. Everything
brings unique insights and it's encouraging to see the hacker mindset in
someone so experienced.

Joel Spolsky - also a great writer.

Chris Sawyer - anyone who could write a full game in assembly is really badass

------
VeejayRampay
Aaron Patterson. For the 10+ years I've followed his work, he's always been
kind, generous, hard-working, an excellent teacher of the craft and, quite
simply, a good person. The same goes for Salvatore Sanfilippo.

------
mdhughes
Jon Bentley, author of Programming Pearls, which is the clearest explanation
of solving the actual problem needed; when I say "software engineering", PP is
what I mean.

William Kent, author of Data & Reality [https://mdhughes.tech/2017/07/19/data-
and-reality-william-ke...](https://mdhughes.tech/2017/07/19/data-and-reality-
william-kent/)

Kent Beck, author of Extreme Programming Explained, for making good
engineering practices "go to 11".

------
erikpukinskis
Why the Lucky Stiff

------
stevekemp
There are almost too many to mention, but @antirez, of redis-fame, is
definitely one of the more interesting and younger programmers.

------
seanmcdirmid
Tim Sweeney of Epic Games has some very interesting ideas on programming and
languages. He inspired me to make a career out of it (for better or worse).

I’ve met and worked with a lot of inspiring good programmers in my life, so it
would be difficult to provide a list of names.

------
veddox
Eric S. Raymond. Though he - like Stallman - is a bit of a controversial
figure, I learnt a lot about software architecture from his "The Art of Unix
Programming". And I admire him for the many key FOSS projects he has been an
important part of.

------
togusa2017
My professor of distributed networking. He always pushed for not accepting the
status quo and think outside the box. Taught me to look through bullshit and
pretense. His use to say TCP is not perfect think of your own protocol

------
flotillo
I'm impressed with and have been inspired by the work many programmers have
produced, but I don't look up to them. As a matter of principle, I think it is
unhealthy behaviour to idolise others.

~~~
veddox
There is a big difference between looking up to somebody and idolising
him/her.

Looking up to somebody means that you admire them for their character and/or
achievements. "Honour to whom honour is due." In a further step, they might
become a role model - meaning that you take them as a personal example because
you want to achieve similar things in life. This is in line with Newton's "If
I have seen far, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." Their
example inspires and guides you in your own efforts.

Idolising starts when you admire somebody so much that you fail to see them as
human. You refuse to admit to their weaknesses and failures. And instead of
seeking inspiration from them for living your own life, you attempt to relive
theirs. They have become a god to you - hence the term, "idol".

------
jakobegger
Pierre-Olivier Latour -- he built Quartz Composer & GitUp, two pretty
incredible tools. Looking at his portfolio, I'm amazed how much high quality
software a single person can build.

------
bradknowles
Seebs — he writes “programs” for his own brain and then runs them fast enough
that he frequently picks up on things that people who are naturally talented
in that area would miss.

------
staticautomatic
The programmers I hire.

------
davidjnelson
Programmers who found world changing companies, meaning they have strong
business acumen.

------
NameNickHN
Joel Spolsky - I especially like the essays about how to treat programmers
right.

------
rufius
Chuck Moore

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astonex
Chandler Carruth. His talks at cppcon and his work is great.

------
combatentropy
John Resig --- jQuery is a tour de force.

------
saluki
@DHH

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juggalo9000
Joe Armstrong

------
kenneth_reitz
Aaron Swartz

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megamindbrian2
You

------
grover_hartmann
* Richard Stallman

* Linus Torvalds

* Satoshi Nakamoto

* Donald Knuth

* Yukihiro Matsumoto

* Terry A. Davis

