To become better programmers, it's really helpful to have a sense of what's possible at higher levels of skill. I'm curious to hear from HN'ers about master programmers you've personally met/worked with. What impressed you? What were they capable of?<p>Edit/update: At this point in my learning, people in software I consider $DEMI_DEITY-like (but have not met/worked with) include Peter Norvig (I have PAIP in front of me and think, He wrote this in his mid-thirties? Gah!), Abelson and Sussman (authors of SICP), and some of the people who created the tools I use (Stallman for Emacs, GvR for Python, Hickey for Clojure). As for personally-encountered greatness, there was one fellow at my last firm who later went on to be in the top 5 in the TopCoder competition, whose speed and ability to build the right abstractions were really impressive - that's vague, but at the time, I wasn't good enough to appreciate his skill in-depth either. :)
The best developer I've ever worked with was a freelancer named Alex in Belarus who worked for $8/hour. I hired him back in 2007 to write a CMS for a heavy data-driven site in PHP. The client needed to be able to upload multi-sheet Excel spreadsheets with formulas, and have the results of the formulas be written into the appropriate tables in the database. Alex did it in about 3 business days, and the code he wrote was hands down the cleanest object-oriented PHP I have ever seen. The only bad part about working with someone in Belarus is payment. It costs about $40 for a wire transfer, and you can't send it directly to Belarus without the recipient having to fill out government paperwork detailing where the money came from. We ended up sending wire transfers in Euros to a bank in Latvia.
Actually worked with would be <a href="http://benrady.com/" rel="nofollow">http://benrady.com/</a>, <a href="http://grack.com/blog/" rel="nofollow">http://grack.com/blog/</a>, and a few other people who don't have online presences.<p>Seen in person but not worked with would be <a href="http://twitter.com/venkat_s" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/venkat_s</a> and <a href="http://www.nealford.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nealford.com/</a>.
Jason Mirra from <a href="http://addepar.com" rel="nofollow">http://addepar.com</a> - knows Java like no other. I think he was teaching at CMU when he was still in highschool.