It was the first library that worked consistently well across the board, provided an easy-to-use CSS-selector based experience to query and manipulate the DOM, and had very solid documentation.
I feel like jQuery is/was a mainstay of the web and although we've seen it lose popularity over the years it's still one of the biggest game changers in my web development tooling.
He also is a key player at Khan Academy* which is one of the best online learning resources to date.
All-in-all I think the guy is an excellent example of an entrepreneurial engineer and I would fanboy so hard if I ever met him.
* Not founder of Khan Academy (doh!)
I agree with your points about John Resig (great choice!), except I'm pretty sure that Resig joined Khan Academy in 2011[1] while Salman Khan[2] was the sole founder in 2008[3].
[1] https://johnresig.com/blog/next-steps-in-2011/-
The internals were impressive too. Making a library that worked with all browsers in those days was no small feat. Furthermore, in its releases, jQuery was always talking about speed --- how must faster it was than the last version. A prioritization of speed is always a good sign.
It was night and day... I'd also throw MooTools in there too. Not to throw them under the bus as they were baby steps in the right direction. But, jQuery just "got it" and was incredibly well designed under the hood as well.
I've always admired the clarity of thought of Rich Hickey [1], creator of Clojure. I wish I could point to a single article or post that outlines his philosophy, but they're all over the Internet. I used to spend hours in the early 2010s scouring the web for his writings/videos.
What I find admirable about Rich is that he was originally trained as a musician, yet has an impressive theoretical grasp of software concepts and is tempered in his designs by way of a battle-tested pragmatism (stemming from his having written software for real-world systems).
I've never written a single line of Clojure (and it's unlikely I will ever do so), but his thinking process has been an inspiration to me.
[1] https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/opinion/geek-of-the-wee...
Writing a full just-in-time compiler for a dynamic language (Lua) [1] that was not only much faster than contemporary browser Javascript engines, but also faster than the Android JVM (at the time) [2].
Also porting that compiler to emit x86, x64, ARM, PPC, MIPS. All as one person.
It was so impressive that I'm actually a little curious what he's been working on now, since he's mostly moved on from the project and has (I'm sure deliberately) little online presence. Maybe some company has some amazing secret project that we'll find out about someday.
Notable: no social media, nothing like that. Just shows up occasionally with something that would take another dev probably a couple years to do.
No social media.
No code of conduct.
He just sat there.
Programming.
Like a psychopath.
But he generally creates 'tech', not 'products' which are much harder to make.
Though of course we owe him and others like him a lot.
Fabrice Bellard is a "programming god" in my opinion :-) The man has done so many different and complicated things that it is mind-blowing. Nobody else even comes close. I really would like to understand his thought processes and way of working. What drives him? How does he approach design and implementation? What are his thoughts on "Software Engineering"? Etcetra, Etcetra ...
Somebody needs to do a proper in-depth interview with him and get him to write a book. There is a brain i really would like to know :-)
- He reflects on the experience of programming.
- He identifies and can articulate what's wrong with our tools, conventions, and thinking.
- He builds and advocates abstractions that don't suffer from those problems.
Even if Clojure and Datomic remain obscure, he'll have taught me what I want to be when I grow up.
Kai Krause - Early Photoshop pioneer, designer of Kai's Power Tools, Bryce. I see him as a kind of artist/programmer, who demonstrated that application software development wasn't just about cranking out features, but about creating an experience for the user, a particular window onto this amazing digital world.
Matthew Dillon - Developer of Dragonfly BSD and prominent old-school Amiga hacker. Absolutely solid programmer. Wish he did more interviews.
Rich Hickey - I don't yet have a reason to use Clojure or Datomic, but I watch every Rich Hickey talk or interview I can get my hands on. Hammock Driven Development is the only development ideology that appeals to me :)
He created the Elm language. While other people ported Haskell-like languages to the web (Purescript, GHCJS, Fay, ... ), Evan found a way to tame the complexity of the web with an evolving architecture that start with something like FRP / Rx and ended up with the Elm Architecture, which hits a sweet spot. You can even use T.E.A. without using Elm! Although it's best using a functional language that supports immutability, otherwise there is more work trying to not mutate things.
T.E.A. has been copied to a number of different languages and is manifested inside the Redux pattern. I think time will hopefully tell that his work will have big influence on UI and Web development in the 2020's, whether we are directly using Elm or something based on those ideas.
T.E.A. is:
A global state.
A set of defined messages that can be sent to update the global state.
An update function - given a message, and the global state returns a new global state and any asynchronous "commands" to execute. Commands go off and do something then post a message once done.
A view function - given a global state returns a representation of how to render the UI. This representation includes messages to send on events such as "onclick".
Subscriptions - these produce messages when things happen in the real world, for example local storage state changes.
http://iquilezles.org/www/index.htm
Here's 'Elevated' a four-kilobyte demo he did (along with others):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o
And here's the writeup:
http://iquilezles.org/www/material/function2009/function2009...
And no, they are simply not '10x' programmers, they're just standing on the shoulders of giants like Ritchie as well as all other programmers are standing on their shoulders too.
But I'm not sure why engineers slag other engineers so often.
Most of the startups in Silicon Valley started as prototypes written by one 10x guy.
(For you HN pedants, that's called an "existence proof.")
If you don't see 10x programmers after the startup phase, that's the fault of corporate mgmt. Tall poppy and all that.
Actually, it's because building a real product is 10x harder than building a prototype.
Because a discovery is more foundational doesn't mean its discoverer is necessarily more of a genius (it can mean that, but it doesn't necessarily). For example, just because Newton and Leibniz discovered the calculus, it doesn't mean they were necessarily greater geniuses (though Newton was a genius) than mathematicians who came after.
Earlier discoveries are impressive because the discoverers had to see something that no one else saw; but on the other hand, it would have been much easier for them to make progress because you reach breakthroughs very quickly once there's an attack. Compare this to fields that are mature -- it's very very hard to make a dent even if you are 10x the genius of the founder of the field.
Comparing geniuses who were active in different periods of time is hard because it's kinda apples and oranges.
For inspiration, take a look at this list [1].
[1] History of Programming Languages: Prominent people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag...
It bows me away. That, to me at least is a rockstar programmer.
Him, Jose Valim of the Eixir project and the guy who wrote Asciinema (one of the best examples of a web / systems project written in elixir and phoenix).
Co-Inventor with Sanjay Ghemawat on:
- MapReduce - Spanner - BigTable - Tensorflow
Jeff Dean Facts: https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-Jeff-Dean-facts
Here is a great article on their partnership: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...
Quote: But, for those who know them both, Sanjay is an equal talent. “Jeff is great at coming up with wild new ideas and prototyping things,” Wilson Hsieh, their longtime colleague, said. “Sanjay was the one who built things to last.”
Jeff on the other hand, because he's slightly more extroverted as you point out, does videos and press which makes it easier to follow him.
Icer Addis of Bloodlust Software had a pretty spectacular run in the '90s with at least 3 high quality emulators.
As for current times, Andrew Gallant, (BurntSushi (ripgrep and related software)) writes very high quality code that is very usable.
Though i have not read all their works (nor completely understood their ideas) just the way of exposition and breadth of their thoughts, the insistence on mathematical rigour and formalism etc. always makes me think that i don't yet understand what "programming" is all about. Just slinging code is NOT enough. The idea of programming to a specification using "correctness by design" methodologies (eg. Hoare triples and logic) seems to me to be fundamental to programming. And yet most of us only follow "trial and error" methodology limited by our own lack of knowledge and discipline.
I suppose that one could argue by writing things for other programmers their productivity using your tools can be seen as an extension of yours - that without John Resig many people would have been less productive therefor he derives a little bit of productivity from each person who uses his library. But maybe it is just because these are the programmers you are most likely to be familiar with.
Derek Sivers is a great developer because he shared his experiences learning (at the time Ruby on Rails was brand new). He's doing that same sharing now with a higher level of abstraction, sharing about how to think.
His website gives a better idea of his interests and involvements. http://www.bradfitz.com/
He designed Kernel Programming Language, a very neat lisp that allow to exploit and reason about the semantics powers that lisp has binged over the years (symbolic, continuations, encapsulation …).
I also highly appreciates the articles that he writes in his blog, they gave me “insights” ...
Chris Sawyer. Built a fun, complex game in Assembly that most people can't do with JavaScript.
Barbara Liskov. Lay the foundation for object oriented back when there was nothing to start with.
Tarn Adams. Lots of room for improvement, but incredible, incredible stamina and understanding of mathematics and procedural generation.
He compares the Tesla to the iPhone and his system Comma AI to the Android.
Alexander Stepanov. (I once pointed out to him a bug in the first version of the STL. Me, a nobody that he had never heard of before. He emailed me three generations of bug fixes in the next two hours.)
I know him a little IRL and, although he hasn't done anything that has made him famous, I believe he's in the same league.
I can recognize a lot of modern developers who are very productive, and seem to have multiple projects on the go. But I always think of Antirez first, he's humble, quiet, thoughtful, and thoroughly competent.
I'd rather work with a careful, slow, and precise, person that an army of super-coders.
They could argue with grace, they could see what was needed and build it.
And even the projects that were built quickly were easy for other people to work on and extend.
Two programmers that are still not fully-appreciated are:
1) Monty Widenius (MySQL, the foundation of both Web 1.0 and 2.0)
2) Antirez (Redis, also the foundation of Web 2.0)