Are there any famous one-man-army programmers?

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answers:

+91 Q:

Are there any famous one-man-army programmers?

Lately I have been learning of more and more programmers who think that if they were working alone, they would be faster and would deliver more quality. Usually that feeling is attached to a feeling that they do the best programming in their team and at the end of the day the idea is quite plausible. If they ARE doing the best programming, and worked alone (and more maybe) the final result would be a better piece of software.

I know this idea would only work if you where enough passionate to work 24/7, on a deadline, and great discipline.

So after considering the idea and trying to learn a little more, I wonder if there are famous one-man-army programmers that have delivered any (useful) software in the past?

+124 A:

Donald Knuth

Sean Bright 2009-02-09 20:27:58

Indeed. He wrote every line of code of TeX himself, and I believe the same is true of Metafont as well. [He often have discussions with other people about important decisions, but all the code was written alone.]

ShreevatsaR 2009-02-10 04:50:05

oh. don't forget that he wrote TeX ON PAPER in a notebook completely then just 'typed it in'... oh and he invented a new style (Literate programming) in the process too.

Kevin Won 2010-02-18 04:12:49

+1 Knuth - it easy to overlook that the second word of The Art of Computer Programming is "art" when the whole book is an extremely dense manifesto of highly efficient data structures and algorithms. But it really and truly is an art form rather than a science or engineering discipline.

Robert Davis 2010-02-18 04:19:22

+86 A:

Linus Torvalds

Andy Mikula 2009-02-09 20:29:28

Linus is more of a manager type then pure dev. the first revision of linux really sucked, it was only after he got others involved that it got good

Matt Briggs 2009-02-09 20:40:05

Exactly. Git is the same way. Linus needs a team :)

jrockway 2009-02-09 20:47:09

ditto, and Linus would be the first to tell you where his strengths lie, and dev is not his best skill. Great guy, btw.

jro 2009-02-09 20:47:49

Agreed - but there's no disputing that he's famous and has delivered useful software :)

Andy Mikula 2009-02-09 21:17:20

Development _is_ a good skill of Linus. He designed and wrote the initial version of Git in about 2 weeks, which was functional.

Eduard - Gabriel Munteanu 2009-02-09 23:00:08

Linus doesn't belong here... he doesn't believe in one-man-army programmers

lubos hasko 2009-02-10 01:51:27

"the first revision of linux really sucked" If you look at the original code I agree. It is suck a mess and probably still hurts the Linux kernel today. And I still wonder if the monolithic approach was the best way to go.

Berlin Brown 2009-02-10 07:21:25

Well, Linus _is_ the army. Whatever he starts, the huge army appears out of nowhere and produces something huge. So, no Linus, no army :)

Dev er dev 2009-02-10 15:41:35

Linus wrote his initial kernel on his own because only he appreciated the monolithic design at the time. Once it was out, he happily welcomed other contributors. I think the OP wants examples of a consistent one man army .. someone who just _always_ wants to work alone.

Tim Post 2009-03-04 04:41:18

Linus's success is based on not being a one-man-army. The GPL was a very important decision of his.

ashawley 2009-03-24 19:24:07

http://xkcd.com/225/

Jason 2009-06-19 08:34:12

@tinkertim - there are no such people. Working with others and being ready to compromise is as improtant as programming knowledge itself. The ones you think that always work alone are just the ones that were much more in the spotlight, so you never thought about the others.

ldigas 2009-08-26 14:39:32

+30 A:

Jon Skeet

So that can't be correct he is a micro celebrity.

David Basarab 2009-02-09 20:29:45

When does Jon Skeet have time for *programming*?

jrockway 2009-02-09 20:48:15

He has an NMI fire every 8ns during which he stops answering prayers and writes several bug-free programs.

Ken 2009-02-09 20:58:23

+1 Just for the comment xD

Andrea Ambu 2009-02-09 20:58:32

+1 also from me for the comments :-)

TomTom 2009-02-13 17:16:57

@jrockway: Jon uses Butterflies: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/305223/jon-skeet-facts/311794#311794

OscarRyz 2009-02-21 01:45:45

+1 It is Skeet!

ZiG 2009-06-19 07:29:27

What has he worked on?

2009-08-20 11:19:14

He's a book writer, forum commenter, not a one-man-arm programmer..

Ciwee 2009-10-25 11:59:22

Jon Skeet writes code whilst sleeping.

Steven 2010-09-23 15:20:57

+16 A:

This isn't just a feeling, this is the an article in the 20th anniversary edition of a book by Frederick Brooks called The Mythical Man Month. This is actually, I would guess, a very frequent situation. The personality of a software developer leads itself to being somewhat independent anyways. I don't know of prime examples, but you may be interested in the book I linked above.

David Morton 2009-02-09 20:30:24

You're not far off, but the theme of MMM is "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later," also known as Brooks law.

Bill the Lizard 2009-02-09 20:42:57

The "No Silver Bullet" article in MMM says: "Study after study shows that the very best designers produce structures that are faster, smaller, simpler, cleaner, and produced with less effort. The differences between the great and the average approach an order of magnitude."

Esko Luontola 2009-02-09 21:10:22

It's actually only the theme of that one essay.

Fabian Steeg 2009-02-09 23:36:49

But it's the one everyone remembers!

catfood 2009-02-10 05:09:35

First, the theme of NSB is "that there will be no more technologies or practices that will serve as "silver bullets" and create a twofold improvement in programmer productivity over two years". Second, that article didn't even appear in the original MMM. It got added to the 20th anniversary edition.

Bill the Lizard 2009-02-10 13:08:24

I give! So noted.

David Morton 2009-02-10 13:14:19

@David: Sorry, I didn't mean to get so pedantic on you. :)

Bill the Lizard 2009-02-10 13:46:55

great book, I`ve enjoyed it a lot

chester89 2009-06-19 08:48:35

+41 A:

Yukihiro Matsumoto did deliver a lot of Ruby all by himself. Ruby's popular now, and lots of people have contributed to it, but he did single-handedly start the ball rolling.

Chris Lutz 2009-02-09 20:31:26

+62 A:

Bill Joy - wrote vi as well as csh, rlogin, rsh, and rcp

Graeme Perrow 2009-02-09 20:32:10

Someone buy that man a dictionary!

Mike Robinson 2009-02-09 20:54:06

Some might consider those programs to be a good reason to use the word infamous instead. Or at least vi and csh. ;)

Chris Charabaruk 2009-02-09 23:33:55

Wasn't Java developed by James Gosling?

Bruce Alderman 2009-02-20 15:13:25

Not to mention the TCP/IP stack for BSD: http://archive.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/index2.html

Yawar 2009-10-01 01:46:04

+5 A:

Paul Vixie.

chaos 2009-02-09 20:32:42

+83 A:

Chris Sawyer. He had a little help with music and graphics, but otherwise RollerCoaster Tycoon was all him. Amazing, especially given the physics engine. Last but not least, the entire game was written in assembly language.

Michael Itzoe 2009-02-09 20:33:55

Don't forget Transport Tycoon, which probably has a bigger cult following than RCT.

Erik Forbes 2009-02-09 20:38:12

All in assembly too!

Malfist 2009-02-09 20:41:53

That game was the shit back when I was, like, 12.

Chris Lutz 2009-02-09 21:06:32

@Chris: And I was in my 30's and playing that game. Are you trying to make some of us feel old?

PTBNL 2009-02-09 21:34:12

I just thought that Chris was like 15 now until I checked his profile. Someone stole some years somewhere. ;)

WolfmanDragon 2009-02-09 22:34:03

Fastest gun in the West --- you beat me by 5 seconds :) Good thing you added the thing about assembler --- that's what I still find the most striking thing :D

onnodb 2009-02-10 07:13:20

Erik: Indeed, just look at OpenTTD.

Esko 2009-02-10 07:52:38

That OpenTTD exists is a testament to how enjoyable Transport Tycoon was.

Rob 2009-02-10 15:34:25

Is it sad that I still play that game from time to time?

Matt Jordan 2009-02-11 18:44:04

Had no idea that was built with ASM. Amazing.

David McGraw 2009-02-12 06:35:17

is there any reason other than "because I can" he ever gave for doing it in ASM???

Epaga 2009-02-12 10:40:46

Because computers were slow back then, and this game didnt use a videocard to make fast moving first person roller coasters!

Karl 2009-02-13 17:49:09

Simucal++. I remember TTD as one of the most stable games I could play on my mid-range Win95 Pentium 1. Running in a fullsize DOS window, I remember it hanging *once*, total loss of keyboard and mouse - for about six minutes. Then it just came back to life and carried on trucking. Unbelievable.

Gaurav 2009-02-13 17:52:39

+1 Erik for 1st person to mention Transport Tycoon. I *loved* that game liked 10 years ago and had the urge to play it a year ago, so installed it and played it - still good :)

JonoW 2009-05-11 10:43:51

Wow, I loved RCT, I can't believe it was done in assembly. I need to go play it again just based on that fact!

wsanville 2010-05-14 02:55:31

+38 A:

Oren Eini aka Ayende Rahien, author of Rhino Mocks and other great open source tools. His is some of the best and most elegant code around.

hmemcpy 2009-02-09 20:33:56

Oren must write code in his sleep, his output is simply tremendous. +1

Matt Briggs 2009-02-09 20:40:53

Not only that, but he also posts a whole lot of info on his blog. I suspect he is actually 3 or 4 people :-P Seriously, he is working on a commercial product, a bunch of open source tools, a blog with multiple updates a day. All of this concurrently.

Jamie Penney 2009-02-09 21:17:44

He is a MACHINE.

IainMH 2009-02-13 19:58:56

+63 A:

Guido van Rossum (author of Python)

ISW 2009-02-09 20:34:22

+89 A:

Richard M. Stallman (RMS). While known recently for political rants about closed source software, in his day he was quite the programmer. He single handedly kept up with commercial lisp machine code for quite some time. Emacs and gcc are some of the things he created.

There's a great description of him in the book in Hackers by Steven Levy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stallman

Steve Rowe 2009-02-09 20:35:02

That's a great book!

SquareCog 2009-02-09 22:19:29

I liked his work with emacs, but it is too bad I haven't heard about any other projects.

Berlin Brown 2009-02-10 07:17:10

Berlin: like gcc, gdb and make?

mjard 2009-02-10 07:26:27

RMS was a one man army keeping up with commercial LISP machines only because he was the only one nuts enough and able to do it :) He did the initial emacs on his own because the concept was just too complex to articulate to anyone else.. but after that, he happily worked with others.

Tim Post 2009-03-04 04:39:31

I didn't realize he wrote gcc as well. Learn something new every day.

Jason Baker 2009-03-07 00:38:55

In his defense, Symbolics people would design Lisp machines probably sitting around offices and tables, allowing RMS to hack up imitations on MIT systems of their designs and feature decisions. He would become a one-man army again to keep Emacs apace with the XEmacs fork.

ashawley 2009-03-24 19:23:06

http://xkcd.com/225/

Jason 2009-06-19 08:33:38

+10 A:

John McCarthy -- wrote the first version of lisp

Rayne 2009-02-09 20:42:31

ICBW, but I thought he designed it as a language to run on a chalkboard. One/more of his students surprised him by actually implementing it.

Alister Bulman 2009-04-10 19:37:07

+1 - the original implementation of 'eval' was done by a grad student.

ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells 2009-06-19 08:43:37

+28 A:

Jamie Zawinski (links to one of the most epic stories in the history of computer science)

Matt Briggs 2009-02-09 20:46:58

Wow. I'm never bitching about an ergonomic keyboard again.

Mike Robinson 2009-02-09 21:06:03

YOU FORGOT LUCID EMACS!

Chris Charabaruk 2009-02-09 23:34:49

That is brilliant.

Ali A 2009-02-09 23:58:22

+6 A:

Derek Smart of Battlecruiser 3000AD was pretty big in his day. Apparently he was pretty good at flame wars too...

Mike Robinson 2009-02-09 20:48:40

Good at flame wars and fighting vending machines, if that old story is true.

Chris Charabaruk 2009-02-09 23:35:27

It's not, to the best of my knowledge (re: vending machine), which may well be poor. Also, Do. Not. Mention. The. Phd. Except in reverence.If Cleve would finish Grimoire he would belong in the clown category too. ;)

peacedog 2009-02-10 13:25:11

+109 A:

Steve Wozniak pretty much was apple's programming staff for the first bit.

Jason Baker 2009-02-09 20:49:53

can't believe I didn't think of the Woz. +1

Matt Briggs 2009-02-09 20:50:35

He designed their early hardware too.

Bill the Lizard 2009-02-09 20:55:53

Woz did some of the early Apple programming, but he was really a hardware guy.

Chris Upchurch 2009-02-10 01:24:17

His book 'iWoz' is an interesting read.He is one of the greatest *inventors* of his era.

Al pacino 2009-02-10 06:38:49

Honestly I can't help feeling that Apple at that time were not very special or even very innovative. I am almost sure there were greater minds at other companies. Woz has just been boosted by modern day Apple hype, mythology and in part history fabrication.

kotlinski 2009-02-10 23:26:06

I remember Woz being known as pretty hot stuff back in the 80s so if it's hype, it's been going on a loooooong time.

willc2 2009-02-17 07:36:46

'Some of' the early software? In the Apple ][ with Integer BASIC, practically every byte was by Wozniak, IIRC. I don't know of any other personal computer ever sold for which that was true.

Darius Bacon 2010-02-04 05:53:21

+21 A:

Steve Gibson

bmb 2009-02-09 20:50:23

+173 A:

John Carmack

The guy that wrote the engine for the Doom games, Wolfenstein, the Quake games, etc. Read Masters of Doom, it is a great history of what he and John Romero have done.

Jamie Penney 2009-02-09 20:54:35

Just don't ask about Daikatana :)

tsilb 2009-02-09 23:12:38

Daikatana was done by Romero after he left iD, don't think there was much Carmack involved ;-)

Jasper Bekkers 2009-02-09 23:17:49

Carmack wasn't involved with Daikatana at all. That was Romero and his own company. Read Masters of Doom, you'll find Romero did some pretty good work in the beginning.

Jamie Penney 2009-02-10 00:19:10

So its not really fair to say Carmack was a one man army.

vanja. 2009-02-10 01:19:31

Romero didn't do any of the graphics engine stuff AFAIK. That was purely Carmack.

Jamie Penney 2009-02-10 02:58:32

I used to read J. Carmack's blog/finger posts in the early 90's and what few papers he wrote... He is and still one of the Einsteins of video game engines and he's literally a rocket scientist :)

David 2009-02-10 05:44:59

I would agree, think John Carmack will voted for one of the best programmers out there.

Berlin Brown 2009-02-10 07:20:31

Carmack's games are as games rather dull but his programming is somewhere near insanely impressive and godlike so his name has to be upvoted.

Esko 2009-02-10 07:41:57

i ve read wiki, he is great

Barbaros Alp 2009-02-10 11:21:41

@Esko "Carmack's games are as games rather dull but his programming.." I'd say yes, but they're dull in an attractive way.

mlvljr 2010-04-02 10:06:34

Carmack is also building sub-orbital spacecrafts. Rocket science is actually *not* rocket science for him...

Stringer Bell 2010-10-27 12:03:48

+55 A:

Just for completeness (not really competitive with today's programming "heros", but truly a "one-man-army" in her times ;-): Ada Lovelace

ISW 2009-02-09 20:56:38

Drats, you posted before I got mine on. delete mine, +1 to you.

WolfmanDragon 2009-02-09 21:07:02

A one-woman-army programmer really :)

Paggas 2009-10-11 21:02:16

+13 A:

Khaled Mardam-Bey, author of mIRC, the famous IRC client.

friol 2009-02-09 20:57:23

+1 - Almost forgot about Khaled and his dedication to IRC.

Kyle Rozendo 2009-12-09 07:00:22

+50 A:

Bjarne Stroustrup for the invention and 1st implementation of C++

ISW 2009-02-09 20:58:08

+13 A:

In the gaming world:

Jon Van Caneghem - Known for the Might and Magic series, he single-handedly wrote, designed and developed the first entry in the series, with just a little help for artwork.
Dan Bunten - Created M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold and a variety of other games, again, back in the early days when game designers were one-man (and, come 1992 for her, one-woman) armies.
Bill Budge - Created Pinball Construction Set, alongside many other games. From scratch. Himself. A great Gamasutra piece on PCS's legacy was published recently.

Not to mention all the Atari alumni who went on to Activision. Remember: In the early days, these were all one-man jobs.

John Rudy 2009-02-09 21:07:27

A lot of early games were one-man-shows.The last couple assembly language games I worked on had 3 or 4 people. This was before source control and we had nightmarish Friday code integrations.

Nosredna 2009-02-10 03:00:30

GAH! I can't even IMAGINE!

John Rudy 2009-02-10 19:46:47

+3 A:

Shaun Inman I guess he was solo

Ayyash 2009-02-09 21:09:16

+9 A:

There are so many great answers here, but I'll add in my own suggestions, and these come from the 1980's heydays of computer games on the Commodore 64:

Andrew Braybrook (Paradroid, Morpheus, Gribbly's Day Out)

Archer MacLean (Jimmy White's Snooker, Dropzone)

Stavros Fasoulas (Sanxion, Delta)

Martin Walker (Citadel)

Jon Hare/Chris Yates (aka Sensible Software) (Wizball, Sensible Soccer)

Ok, that last one is more of a "two-man" army, however, many of these guys worked (mostly) alone, coded mostly in assembler (6510) and also did sound, music and graphics all by themselves.

(Useless trivia - My gravatar is Gribbly Grobbly from Gribbly's day out!)

CraigTP 2009-02-09 21:09:41

The Morpheus diary: http://www.zzap64.co.uk/mentalprocre.html

tovare 2009-02-09 21:54:00

+1 because i loved sensible soccer :))

Shadi Almosri 2009-06-17 16:48:28

+51 A:

Larry Wall - Perl.

And for a fun trip to see what goes in that fabulous mind of his , C programmers can read the winning entry in the international C obfuscation contest in 1986. It's filed under wall.c

Learning 2009-02-09 21:34:36

He also wrote patch and rn, iirc

Dana 2009-02-09 23:19:19

+6 A:

Matthew Smith, wrote Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy all on his lonesome.

Coder 42 2009-02-09 21:57:22

+3 A:

Paul Lutus (Apple Writer, among others)

Brent.Longborough 2009-02-09 22:07:24

+9 A:

Richard Greenblatt, wrote much stuff at MIT AI Lab, including chess program, Lisp Machine, etc. etc.

Mike Dunlavey 2009-02-09 22:16:09

Also mentioned in the book hackers, by Steven Levy. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!

tsilb 2009-02-09 23:14:23

+3 A:

Wayne Ratliff - dBASE. Best example of foundational PC software, written the hard way (in assembler).

le dorfier 2009-02-09 22:23:55

+7 A:

Nick Bradbury. He wrote HomeSite, TopStyle, and FeedDemon. All three programs top notch. Plus, he pays a lot of attention to his users - that can't be easy for a one-man shop.

Craig O 2009-02-09 22:29:25

+18 A:

John Backus - Fortran

Stephen Wolfram - Mathematica package

Sid Meier - Civilization

Tim Berners-Lee - inventor of World Wide Web

Phil Zimmermann - PGP

ldigas 2009-02-09 22:30:28

Wow Civilization is a great game, cant imagine doing all that with just 1 guy... amazing

DFectuoso 2009-02-09 22:34:34

I never followed the sequels, but the first one was always credited to him.

ldigas 2009-02-09 22:52:00

+1 for civilization

klew 2009-02-26 21:59:40

3 downvotes with no comment. Really tells something about the character of a person.Besides, what in the world could have bothered them in a list like this, is beyond me ...

ldigas 2009-10-17 16:34:48

+16 A:

Chuck Moore - Created Forth, ported it to dozens of architectures, designed several microprocessors, made his own CAD system, earned millions on hardware patents, created colorForth... and so on.

kotlinski 2009-02-09 23:08:16

I said 'Slava' because of Factor.

Berlin Brown 2009-02-10 07:19:45

+7 A:

Simon Tatham wrote PuTTY. Arguably, one of the most popular [citation needed] windows SSH clients.

Matt Wright wrote a lot of (in)famous Perl scripts that are still in use.

Joe 2009-02-09 23:13:21

+46 A:

Anders Hejlsberg creator of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# (and partly .NET), ....

2009-02-09 23:21:45

+5 A:

My $0.02: Cleve Moler - original author of MATLAB.

gnovice 2009-02-09 23:47:40

+39 A:

Bram Cohen, at least his little project is now causing 50% of all internet traffic[citation needed].

Michael Stum 2009-02-09 23:50:35

OOO, these are all good.

Berlin Brown 2009-02-10 07:18:32

Can you use bittorrent for anything but getting CDs and movies.

Berlin Brown 2009-02-10 07:19:06

you can use it for anything that needs to be transported to people.

Svish 2009-02-10 08:34:17

Yes, BitTorrent is used for example by Blizzard to distribute their World of Warcraft Patches or digital downloads from their online store. Also, Linux distributions use it for their DVDs. I will use it for my stuff because 4 GB Webspace is $$$.

Michael Stum 2009-02-10 11:49:19

@svish - I'd like a chocolate bar please, can you seed?

AShelly 2009-02-10 20:10:22

+12 A:

Geo 2009-02-10 01:06:38

I'd say you're pushing the term "famous" a little too far with this one :) Compared to the others in the bunch here.

ldigas 2009-02-10 02:51:00

I don't think the Ruby people would agree :)

Geo 2009-02-10 15:56:18

+3 A:

Markus Frind CEO of Plentyoffish.com

One man show . Created one of largest dating site by himself using asp.net Gross upwards of 30k day .

2009-02-10 01:17:55

why is this getting voted down?

BPAndrew 2009-02-10 13:21:12

I wonder this too.

2009-02-10 18:36:24

I would say this is due to him being more of a standard website developer rather than a technical innovator in the field.

Shadi Almosri 2009-06-17 16:49:33

+3 A:

Probably not on the scale of RMS or Carmack, but Jonathan Blow made Braid single-handedly. Look at how the audio and particle systems reverse in sync with the gameplay; it's a pretty neat effort.

frezned 2009-02-10 01:23:26

I can't imagine Braid without David Hellman's lovely artwork, though. It'd still be tons of fun, but I don't think it would draw you in quite as much as it does now :-). Check out http://www.davidhellman.net/blog/the-art-of-braid-index/, it's a fascinating read.

Gaurav 2009-02-13 18:03:39

Wow, thanks - that was indeed fascinating. If only one could upmod comments!

frezned 2009-02-16 00:26:02

+31 A:

DJ Bernstein. qmail, djbdns, and many many others.

Oh, and suing the United States so people here can freely publish cryptography tools on the Internet. Not exactly programming, but totally one-man-army.

chazomaticus 2009-02-10 02:34:07

djb's a great entry; I'm not sure how many of the other entries are "one-man-army" programmers, but it's certainly something djb is noted for. Or so I've heard tell on the interwebs.

Gaurav 2009-02-13 18:07:21

+5 A:

Charles Babbage - Originator of the concept of a programmable computer.

David HAust 2009-02-10 03:12:16

+18 A:

Phil Katz absolutely deserves mention. Where would we have been without PKZip.

Jim Blizard 2009-02-10 03:19:48

We'd be using SEA's ARC :-) But yes, PKZIP was quite important when Modems were still slower than postal mail.

Michael Stum 2009-02-10 11:52:41

+6 A:

Has anyone mentioned Gary Kildall (CP/M) or are you guys too young to remember?

psant 2009-02-10 03:34:56

+12 A:

This is one of those great programmers who doesn't have the "Knuth" fame - Fabrice Bellard. He wrote the original FFmpeg distribution, is the project leader for QEMU, discovered the fastest current pi algorithm, and has not one, but two, wins in the The International Obfuscated C Code Contest. To use a line from one of my favorite CS professors, the man is a rock star.

2009-02-10 06:03:55

Two decades ago, he also wrote a program used by many MS-DOS programmers: LZEXE. It's like PKLITE (or UPX, these days), but he was definitely a pioneer.

Chris Jester-Young 2009-05-21 03:39:22

+3 A:

dark_alex - though branded as hacker, its still falls under this one-man-army category

lock 2009-02-10 06:11:43

+4 A:

Pixel - Cave Story

kotlinski 2009-02-10 07:12:42

+2 A:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slava_Pestov

Slava Pestov. Factor creator (Factor is one of the most advanced programming languages out there).

Created Jedit (at 15 years old?)

Berlin Brown 2009-02-10 07:14:19

Slava Pestov, born 3 March 1984... jEdit, first release 1998... *jaw drops*

Michael Myers 2009-02-10 16:12:54

That is pretty cool

Berlin Brown 2009-02-10 17:11:18

+2 A:

Jon Tackabury - Binary Fortress

BPAndrew 2009-02-10 13:19:58

+2 A:

Doug Cutting

Started Lucene, started Nutch, created Hadoop after Google publish there paper on Map Reduce...

florent 2009-02-10 14:59:59

That is one of my favorite java projects. Yes, upmodded.

Berlin Brown 2009-02-10 17:13:17

+5 A:

Eugene Roshal for creation of FAR file manager, RAR file format and WinRAR file archiver.

z-boss 2009-02-10 15:28:59

+2 A:

Rich Hickey - author of Clojure.

Dev er dev 2009-02-10 15:36:03

+1 A:

I've always been impressed by Scawen Roberts, who has been single-handedly programming the game Live for Speed for the last five or so years.

Fara 2009-02-10 15:36:36

+5 A:

Steve Streeting whom created Ogre3D, the Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine.

Kezzer 2009-02-10 15:40:43

+26 A:

Read this article for example, starting twowards the middle at about the place where it says,

... the privately held company Celera appeared on the verge of beating the combined scientific teams of the rest of the world to the goal of sequencing the human genome. Celera's approach was less rigorous but faster than the Human Genome Project's approach, and for a very understandable reason: Celera's goal was not to advance science but to win the race by any means fair or foul and thereby claim what would have been the most astonishing conquistadorial prize in human history. For had Celera won the race to sequence the genome, and had it filed patents aggressively, it is conceivable that one tiny company could have laid claim to royalties on virtually all medical progress thenceforward. Nay, they could have claimed proprietary interest in the evolutionary future of the human race.

Never mind that the proposition was more ludicrous, on the face of it, than a private company's laying claim to the moon. The threat was real, and scientists were scared.

This state of affairs was remedied by the heroic efforts of a once obscure University of California at Santa Cruz biology graduate student named Jim Kent, who, over the course of 40 days of coding so furiously that he literally had to soak his wrists in ice baths every night, wrote a program to assemble and make public the Human Genome Project's own map. He completed the task one day ahead of Celera.

Kent's stealth attack thereby beat Celera at its own game virtually single-handedly, in a feat that deserves to become as iconic as Watson and Crick's.

ChrisW 2009-02-10 15:50:20

His wrists? I would've moved to a more finger-based technique, then.

Yar 2009-06-29 18:04:44

+2 A:

Most of the notable hackers of the world for good or ill:

Eric Corley, Kevin Mitnick, Solar Designer, Lamo? Poulson?

annakata 2009-02-10 15:53:02

+2 A:

Wayne Venables, allegedly wrote the Fruitshow forum software in 3 hours

Locutus 2009-02-10 20:02:45

Wayne is the best in my book.

Berlin Brown 2009-02-10 20:09:05

+4 A:

Arthur Whitney, the developer of the "K" programming language.

Where I heard about him: Superstar programmers

Thought experiment:

The requirement is to build from scratch an SQL engine working on in memory data (take > this as a given. Try to estimate the no. of lines of code (programming language/environment of your choice) this is going to take, and the time it will take you to build it.

Try to estimate the same considering someone you consider good, and someone you consider average.

Scroll down when you've written down your estimates.

Did you ?

Well ?

Using the programming language K, [ http://nsl.com/k/t.k ], a 14 line implementation, took Stevan Apter a couple of hours to write; But that's just the backend. You want an SQL interface? Arthur Whitney just published one in [ http://kx.com/q/e/s.k ], taking all of 20 lines (admittedly, denser than Stevan's); 3 for lexing, ~8 for parsing, the rest for evaluating. I don't know how long it took Arthur, but a day would probably be way too long.

Evgeny 2009-02-10 21:56:48

+3 A:

Al Lowe for Leisure Suit Larry series :) Will Wright for SimCity and finally David Braben for Elite

Perhaps Ron Gilbert should also get a mention for bringing the world Monkey Island (tm)

Damien 2009-02-11 17:37:59

+1 I was about to post Al Lowe

Kb 2009-02-13 17:30:06

+39 A:

John Resig, creator of the jQuery javacript framework.

Jonathan Sampson 2009-02-11 17:50:21

you had me at 'jQuery'

BPAndrew 2009-02-11 18:04:01

+1 I like his works.

grayger 2009-02-20 10:03:34

+1 great guy - and a great blog too.

alex 2009-07-14 13:05:41

+2 A:

Didier Dambrin: Original creator of FruityLoops. Written in Delphi.

BBetances 2009-02-11 18:41:21

+14 A:

Sid Meier

Co-founded Microprose and wrote Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, and Sid Meier's Colonization,[2][3], Sid Meier's Civilization IV and a bunch more

asp316 2009-02-11 18:46:04

I don't know about the others, but I'm pretty sure he didn't have much to do with Civ2. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_II

Gaurav 2009-02-13 18:11:49

+1: Civ IV was and still is the best video game i've ever played. Do you know it a V is coming out?

BBetances 2009-02-13 18:12:16

@Gaurav. Looks like you're right on.

asp316 2009-02-13 19:52:38

He didn't write Alpha Centauri by himself, either. He became famous for writing Civ 1, and it seems like he has mostly done collaboration/team management since then.

drhorrible 2009-07-22 14:15:15

he was already stated "upstairs" :)

ldigas 2009-08-26 14:42:32

This is like giving Bill Gates credit for Windows 7... Sid Meier is more a manager than anything else. With recent games, it seems like his name is just a brand...

BobMcGee 2010-01-12 01:55:56

@Bob. The question was - a one man army ...wrote software in the past...Not, was the latest piece of software written solely by this person...

asp316 2010-01-12 06:26:09

Is there any evidence that he wrote Civ by himself? And if he did, due to preference rather than necessity? That's what this thread is about.

Kirk Broadhurst 2010-03-25 12:58:34

+5 A:

Walter Bright was once a one-man show for several years when it came to Digital Mars' C++ compiler. He also started the D language and wrote a C++ version of Empire by himslef (later ported it to D).

Max Lybbert 2009-02-12 22:13:57

+8 A:

Shawn Fanning, creator of Napster.

Lurker Indeed 2009-02-13 17:46:46

+2 A:

DJ Delorie for DJGPP? Not sure if that was a one man job, though.

Gaurav 2009-02-13 18:16:57

+3 A:

Rod Johnson, creator of Spring framework

grayger 2009-02-20 14:58:16

+2 A:

Peldi Guilizzoni, the creator of Balsamiq--an Adobe AIR application for creating mockups. The blog post with statistical numbers about first (not full) year of company operation provides a lot of information to think about.

myroslav 2009-02-21 01:01:51

Al Gore - He wrote the entire Internet!

JohnFx 2009-02-21 01:19:03

Aww, c'mon. It was a fluff question. Fluff answers should get some love too.

JohnFx 2009-03-04 23:33:56

They're just trying to reward you with a Peer Pressure badge. :)

chaos 2009-03-11 03:11:01

I already have it, so it is safe to upvote me now. =)I can spare the 3 rep points for a chance to take a jab at Mr. Green McGreeny. It was worth it.

JohnFx 2009-03-11 17:48:44

+2 A:

Nasir Gebelli wrote some of the early great Apple II games: Gorgon, Space Eggs, Firebird and Zenith (and many others.)

David Stafford 2009-02-21 01:25:11

+7 A:

Bram Moolenaar -- wrote almost all of VIM by himself :]

Richard Marquez 2009-02-21 01:40:27

Curse the day! I am still avoiding vim, but it's always waiting in ambush.

Yar 2009-06-29 18:06:14

+1 A:

Simon Peyton Jones - Functional programming researcher and original author of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler.

Jared Updike 2009-02-26 21:49:07

+4 A:

Wil Shipley of Delicious Library - http://www.delicious-monster.com/company.php

Benny Wong 2009-06-09 17:49:02

+5 A:

Joe Hewitt, creator of Firebug and DOM Inspector.

I love Firebug. It made web page debugging way easier.

ZiG 2009-06-19 07:47:36

+4 A:

Juan Valdez. Ok, he did't wrote a single line of code. But he helped to code most of apps that we use today.

Jonathan 2009-06-19 08:29:37

Not everyone drinks Columbian! ;)

BobMcGee 2010-01-12 01:59:51

Kernighan, Ritchie, James Clark, Audrey Tang. Bob Scheifler and Jim Gettys (X11). Jon Bentley. John Ousterhout (tcl/tk).

xcramps 2009-06-19 08:37:59

+2 A:

I am the creator of this post.... one man army

2009-07-30 23:42:21

Donald Knuth, Ken Thompson, RMS, linus torvalds, Fabrice Bellard, ZeroCool :)

ZeroCool 2009-08-15 04:35:56

+3 A:

The Build Engine History

The Build engine was written by Ken Silverman in 1994 and has gone through several major enhancements from its initial version. Ken wrote a game named "Ken's Labyrinth" in 1992 which he sent demos of to several games companies. One of those companies was Apogee Software. Apogee wasn't interested in the game but they were interested in the engine. He later started writing a demo named "Build" in 1993 which he also sent out to several companies. Apogee offered him a contract to write the Build engine for them.

Ken has a page on his website which features a timeline outlining the development and events surrounding the Build engine. Ken also has available for download old demos of the engine at various points in it's development and now the full source code!

mangokun 2009-08-15 05:18:14

John Carmack - No need for introduction ;)

Dave Cutler - Only guy on the planet to have worked on 3 major OS kernels. Not sure if he is a one-man-army kinda guy, but certainly did a lot on his own.

Michael Abrash - Optimization god! If he can't optimize it, it probably can't be done at all!

Tim Sweeney - Unreal Engine (Currently working alone on the 4th generation of Unreal Technology)

Steve Wozniak - Apple's one-many-army

2009-08-15 05:23:36

C.W.Holeman II 2010-02-21 00:07:58

Paul Lutus the father of Apple Writter for the Apple II

2009-08-20 12:04:44

Peter Blum, creator of a nice collection of very useful custom ASP.NET controls. On top of everything else he does, his documentation is some of the most detailed I've ever seen even outdoing Microsoft's in granularity. And yet he still does it all himself.

Steve Wortham 2009-09-25 21:05:50

Matt Mullenweg?

Created WordPress, BBPress (wrote in a few days), etc.

Pretty influential in web development with regard to weblogs. Doing well for a 25 y/o.

ricbax 2009-10-16 14:43:38

From a technical view wordpress is not really impressive.. but it works great none the less :P

Chris 2010-02-18 04:12:45

Gus Mueller.

Paul D. Waite 2010-02-18 04:08:09

+1 A:

I can't believe I'm the first person to mention this:

Alan Turing

Robert Davis 2010-02-18 14:52:53

+2 A:

Jordan Mechner

He programmed first Prince of Persia games. All animations on those games were based on his brother's moves. I guess he isn't programming anymore.

Ufuk Hacıoğulları 2010-05-19 15:31:49

Carl Friedrich Gauss - the man behind most of humanities understanding probably fits this description.

ldog 2010-07-22 07:02:42

ansaurus

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Are there any famous one-man-army programmers?

The Build Engine History

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