Stackoverflow: Are there any famous one-man-army programmers?

Dave Cutler.<p>It's a bit of a shame that the world at large doesn't get to see his code in NT. It is by far the most gorgeous C code I've seen. In fact, in the beginning, there have been times when I used to look up his code just to feel inspired (think of it as 'code inspiration').<p>Getting to meet him and work in the same team as him for the last few years has definitely been the highlight of my Microsoft career.<p>Also, my wife (HN username:arithmetic) will tell you that getting a autographed copy of Showstopper was one of the best gifts I've gotten her :)

I'm surprised to see Markus Alexej Persson (aka Notch) missing from that list for Minecraft. Between doing the coding and art, he's demonstrated that he can basically do it all.

&#62; Chris Sawyer [...] RollerCoaster Tycoon [...] entire game was written in assembly language.<p>That is quite humbling to say the least.

Also, I know some programmers who generally program best if just left alone to do their job, instead of trying to get the 'team' to decide everything. Left to their own devices, they end up with the 'right'* answer in much less time than if forced to argue design with a team and then work with a team to implement it.<p>I know others that work best in a team and definitely benefit from talking out the entire design beforehand, and then coding pieces of it together.<p>So yes, there's a very good chance that those programmers who think they work better alone actually do work better alone. It's probably experience talking, and not just hubris.<p>* (Yes, I know there's no 1 'right' answer. The answers they come up with are always as good as they get, though.)

I'm so surprised Fabrice Bellard is so far down. The guy is absolutely one of the greatest developers I've ever ever had the luxury of reviewing the code of.<p>By comparison, DJB is a force of nature when it comes to programming, but reading his code can be a little difficult (try understanding qmail's source base as an example). I have to admit though, _why's is the most readable of all truly great code, despite the fact that it's at least mostly in ruby.

Basically every independent game developer.

I believe Bill Joy has to make the list.<p>From wikipedia:<p>"Some of his most notable contributions were the vi editor, NFS, and csh. Joy's prowess as a computer programmer is legendary, with an oft-told anecdote that he wrote the vi editor in a weekend. Joy denies this assertion.[2] Joy's accomplishments have been sometimes exaggerated; Eric Schmidt, CEO of Novell at the time, inaccurately reported during an interview in PBS's documentary Nerds 2.0.1 that Joy had personally rewritten the BSD kernel in a weekend."<p>"Joy was also a primary figure in the development of the SPARC microprocessors, the Java programming language, Jini / JavaSpaces and JXTA."<p>"BBN had a big contract to implement TCP/IP, but their stuff didn't work, and Joy's grad student stuff worked. So they had this big meeting and this grad student in a T-shirt shows up, and they said, "How did you do this?" And Bill said, "It's very simple — you read the protocol and write the code."

I posted it on the page but one guy some here might like:<p>L. Peter Deutsch for writing the PDP-1 version of Lisp at the age 12 (he was the son of an MIT prof and was hanging out with MIT Hackers back in the 60s) he also wrote Ghostscript

Dan Ingalls, implementor of Smalltalk isn't on the list.

My answer was James Clark: he did groff, sgmls, expat, and important parts of the XML and Relax NG specs among others.

I will go with a real-life example. A person that I know of.<p>Ishaan Chattopadhyaya IMO, not many outsiders know of him but he single-handedly rewrote MapQuest Search.

<a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff" rel="nofollow">http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff</a> nuff said.

How about X-Plane creator Austin Meyer?

I'm sad to see that there's not been any mention of Geoff Crammond (Revs, The Sentinel, Stunt Car Racer, Formula One Grand Prix). He was singled out even 'back in the day' for being the ultimate one-man army when it came to game development.

Flavien Brebion, not quite famous but is making a highly anticipated sci-fi game. <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Infinity_%28MMOG%29" rel="nofollow">https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Infinity_%28M...</a>

Casey seems to be the one-man programmer/sysadmin of Ravelry: <a href="http://codemonkey.ravelry.com/2011/02/12/ravelry-in-bullet-points/" rel="nofollow">http://codemonkey.ravelry.com/2011/02/12/ravelry-in-bullet-p...</a>

Lennart Poettering - Creator of Avahi,pulseaudio, systemd <a href="http://0pointer.de/lennart/" rel="nofollow">http://0pointer.de/lennart/</a>

Gabest of mediaplayer classic, whoever that may be. Avery Lee of virtualdub.

<a href="http://www.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/MythGeniusProgrammer.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/MythGeniusProg...</a>

Don't know about famous, but this guy seems like a one-man-army-programmer. <a href="http://www.losethos.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.losethos.com/</a>

fabrice.bellard.free.fr - <a href="http://bellard.org/" rel="nofollow">http://bellard.org/</a>