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Comment by mixmax | Hacker News Reader

"In contrast there are masters in the martial arts who learned their art as a means of survival and became masters in a realistic and hostile environment. We don’t have anyone like this in the programming profession, or at least I haven’t met any."

I think maybe Peter Norvig would qualify.

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

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There are many people who I think qualify. Ken Thompson, Steve McConnell, Brian Fox, and Larry Wall would be just a few on my list.

Ward Cunningham, Don Knuth (mentioned in the OP) and Linus Torvalds also qualify, as well, I think. Note that I'm not simply listing out random famous software people. I don't think Martin Fowler qualifies, for instance.

The OP brought up and specifically disqualified Don Knuth because he had freedom as an academic that working software developers don't. The example given was his ability to take off 3 years to work on TeX.

By those criteria I consider Linus Torvalds likely to be disqualified as well since he made his reputation while using the freedom he had as a student.

Ward Cunningham would be a good addition to the list.

I wonder how Don Knuth would fare writing something like TeX under time constraints. I suspect that most programmers would prefer to have unlimited time to make things "perfect" rather than be under pressure; just because Knuth had the liberty to take that option doesn't mean he wouldn't do as well as (if not better than) anyone else on a restricted schedule.

In my experience, getting anything done when you have unlimited time is a challenge upon itself.

I second that. I also think that a person who quitted using email in 1990 for not loosing time for his studies, wouldn't have unlimited time for writing Tex.

My vote would be Arthur Whitney: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242

+1 he always sounds sound

Jamie Zawinski. Jeff Dean and a lot of the other early Google employees, many of whom aren't well known outside the company. Dave Cutler, Steve Wozniak, Doug Cutting, John Carmack.

I would love with(hell, under) Carmack for a year.

I hope you're missing a second verb there.

Ah, yes - work :)

Not that there is anything wrong with wanting to love with/under Carmack...

Bill Joy

"As a UC Berkeley graduate student, Joy worked for Fabry's Computer Systems Research Group CSRG in managing the BSD support and rollout where many claim he was largely responsible for managing the authorship of BSD UNIX, from which sprang many modern forms of UNIX, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Apple Inc. has based much of the Mac OS X kernel and OS Services on the BSD technology.

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]"

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

Jamie Zawinski, whom Peter Norvig called the best programmer he ever hired.

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