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Comment by programjames | Hacker News Reader

You're not making any sense to me. How did you get from "not famous" to "must not being a great programmer"?

They are rockstarts because they have technical skills AND soft skills. Sure, John Carmack was a technical beast when it came to computer graphics. But one can't work for Facebook/Meta from 2013 to 2019 (and as a consultant until 2022) without soft skills.

John Carmack can have all the soft skills in the world. If he wasn't technically credible, it does not matter. This topic is about how to get that level of technical proficiency, how to become a great programmer.

Jumping in and telling folks to be a great communicator or tech lead instead is not the way to become a great programmer. That's the way to become a great staff engineer. They're not the same things.

The point is that Carmack's work was extremely influential. That wouldn't have been true if he wasn't technically great, but technically great work can fail to have any influence whatsoever. Which is greater?

You keep repeating the same idea: they're a great programmer because they're influential. You seem to be missing the point everyone else is trying to make: being a great programmer has nothing to do with being influential. Lisp is a great programming language, yet very few people use it. C++ and Javascript? Practically viruses, but every browser relies on them.

Yes, it's true that many great programmers are also highly influential. But Linus was a git (his word, not mine). He isn't influential because of soft skills, it's because he was already a great programmer.

Lisp was and still is extremely influential.

I didn't say anything about soft skills either. Leadership can be highly technical.

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