FTA: Plus you have the difficulty of evaluating a "great" programmer in an unfamiliar language. Most people would agree that Linus Torvalds ... is a great programmer. But take him out of the Linux "C" world and make him try to get a job programming Java, and likely he would suck, at least initially, and maybe even be fired for being terrible.
To believe this, you would have to wildly underestimate the value of having a great sense of program design. Not 1 in 10,000 programmers could design something as elegant as Git. It wouldn't matter if he wrote the whole thing as a bash script or a Java program using one big singleton class. The theory of the program, which drives its implementation but is larger than it, is what makes the program (and the programmer) great.
Incidentally, the author is also clearly unaware of some 'facts' about Linus:
To believe this, you would have to wildly underestimate the value of having a great sense of program design. Not 1 in 10,000 programmers could design something as elegant as Git. It wouldn't matter if he wrote the whole thing as a bash script or a Java program using one big singleton class. The theory of the program, which drives its implementation but is larger than it, is what makes the program (and the programmer) great.
Incidentally, the author is also clearly unaware of some 'facts' about Linus:
http://www.linuxscrew.com/2007/10/28/fun-chuck-norris-vs-lin...