Fabrice Bellard, the mind behind FFMpeg and QEMU.
The other two I thought of are Peter Norton and Linus Torvalds.
Fabrice, despite his tremendous contributions to the field, doesn't reach for acclaim and just seems to go his own way.
Peter Norton was a genius in his field. His book on Assembly Language was one of my favorites as a youth. Norton tools were impressive for their time.
Linus, as the namesake for Linux also made a huge impact on the field... and comes off as somewhat of an uncontrolled lunatic.
I don't though think that these three people are the highest level masters in the field. I think they are just the ones who have chosen to do things that have high impact and visibility.
Ha! Would you consider Musk also as a Lunatic? :-)
What? Linus is one of the most Rational, Direct, No-Nonsense, Get Things Done Leader there is. Whenever i hear some self-appointed "expert" pontificate on Leadership/Management/etc. i always think of what Linus would say/do in that situation. People only think of him as a "Technical Guy" but his Leadership/Management of something so vital, so huge, so distributed, with so many "employees" and with so few resources, so many stakeholders is what is amazing to me. Nobody comes close.
You really need to take back the "uncontrolled lunatic" phrase.
I'll agree that many of the things he says are reasonable. An example is his recent defense of long lines and dismissal of the insane "80 characters per line" peeps.
What I mean specifically by "uncontrolled lunatic" is that he often ignores convention and current opinion and does and says things that get him into trouble. He also has a temper that he often is bad at controlling. I myself have this issue, and I don't see how one could say he does not have issues in this regard.
While it requires some amount of perpendicular thinking to be a master of software, having such an attitude and working with other people in that way will cause too much conflict that is unnecessary.
I think what you are missing in my statement is that I consider calling someone an "uncontrolled lunatic" as a sort of compliment.
I agree also that he is less of a technical person and more of a manager. His skills lie in herding.
On the other hand; Git is a flaming piece of garbage and he is directly responsible for its popularity... so... He did though reasonably tell people he didn't intend for anyone outside of kernel developers to use it. I just wish he corrected its deficiencies. Maybe someday he can apply his "arbitrary character restrictions are silly" logic to Git comments and become less contradictory.
Genius cannot be constrained by every single artificial social more and etiquette; we are Humans not Automatons. As long as they do not lead to destruction of product/project/self/others it is merely a character trait which makes the person unique. All successful companies know this and "manage" their most important people accordingly.
Justifying treating others poorly just enables more people being hurt. We should not reward people for this sort of behavior. Turning a blind eye to it because "they are great software engineers" is not right.
Your comment treads very much into the "for the greater good" mentality where you can justify anything based on the results.
"Unique character trait" my ass. Obnoxious aholes are just that. Obnoxious aholes. They need to fucking stop and be more kind.
It is also quite ironic that while you talk about "being nice/kind" your posts are the ones containing inflammatory phrases like "uncontrolled lunatic", "arrogance and obnoxious attitude", "my ass" and "obnoxious aholes" !
Coming back specifically to Linus, he has never been any of the above. He has been direct and harsh when needed (there is a world of difference between this and the phrases you have used), otherwise he has shown a lot of restraint. For example, he has said that due to the nature of email communication, one has to be direct since a lot of non-verbal and personal nuances cannot be conveyed which is exactly right.
I am sure we can all recollect email chains/discussions/meetings where nothing was ever achieved because people did not want to offend somebody with thin skin in spite of the fact that they were squarely to blame. Being direct and calling them out is not being obnoxious/arrogant but simply moving things along towards a goal. To be nice/kind does not mean everybody has to be mollycoddled and tip-toed around due not wishing to "hurt their feelings". Engineering is a hard science and while we have to follow social mores and etiquettes this should be regulated (i.e. we should know when to break them) so that progress towards the end goal is not derailed.
Linus has said many attacking things publicly under a position of authority.
What I say here bears no weight because if what I say is disliked I am simply downvoted and dismissed.
I disagree that being offensive solves anything. I am fine ( as you've pointed out ) with being extremely offensive and attacking the shit out of anyone I see fit, but I don't think it is particularly effective or a quality trait.
Anytime you say things in an offensive way, you are intentionally being hurtful. This is not a good thing, and I don't think is justifiable.
My doing it in no way makes it right, nor invalidates my judgement of those who make similar statements to a broad audience.
Consider the effect of me ranting here. No one is going to go: "Wow I'd better pay attention to what permille42 says he is an expert. He must be attacking people for a good reason."
Nope. Anytime I rant most readers will just immediately dismiss everything I said, mostly because my tone tends to be so aggressive. I don't think such people are wrong to dismiss as such aggressive statements do tend to be from people who are offbase and don't know what they are talking about...