Ask HN: Who is the best computer programmer of all times?

4•xqb64•53m ago

My personal favorite is Fabrice Bellard.

Comments

jleyank•48m ago

You'd have to come up with the criteria for "best" but as an old hacker, "from MIT or Bell Labs" comes to mind as where to look. Maybe some of their spinoffs, but those sites did amazing things with basically nothing.

xqb64•40m ago

Yeah. Andy Tanenbaum described studying at MIT as "drinking from a fire hose". Do we have someone who both got their degree from MIT and worked at Bell Labs? That'd be an interesting combo.

bdangubic•47m ago

Mike Evanston

rstagi•43m ago

"best" is a relative term, but in terms of technology we all use every day I would say either Linus Torvalds or Jeff Dean are up there among the best for sure

xqb64•33m ago

Sort of, the one who, when left stranded on a desert island, would make a CPU out of sand, write software for it, including the entire TCP/IP stack, and email someone to come get them.

chairmansteve•24m ago

D. Richard Hipp is up there for me.

I love the minimalism of his programs, SQLLite and Fossil. Also involved in Tcl, my favourite language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._Richard_Hipp

__patchbit__•17m ago

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