This is not a 10X programmer. A 10X programmer delivers the same amount of functionality in 1/10 the time.
For me the first 10x programmer that comes to mind is Peter Norvig. This spell checker he wrote in a single flight remains a work of art:
https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
Very few programmers would come up with something so concise and elegant yet powerful in such a short amount of time.
Yeah, he was at Google at the time (https://norvig.com/resume.html) so he was probably involved in the original development of the thing he was making a demo of.
He's definitely smarter than me with that CV but this particular project doesn't seem like some insane productivity achievement.
Writing and debugging production code is a different skill set. Finding the optimal algorithm is useful but not the same as releasing it into the wild which may require maintaining backwards compatibility, work arounds for bugs in other code or hardware bugs that can no longer be fixed at the foundry - the list goes on.
The vast majority of work programmers do 10X or otherwise is not greenfield where you get to pick the programming language you have 10K hours of experience using, the best hardware or an unlimited budget of money and time.
Now I would consider Dr Norvig a 10X educator. That program demonstrates how a decent knowledge of algorithms and math can take a relatively complex problem and make it tractable.
I guess it’s worth pointing out that he does support one of the arguments the article makes:
> But they didn't, and come to think of it, why should they know about something so far outisde their specialty?
So yeah, he’s implicitly saying, “I have a lot of domain knowledge here.”
But that said: wow, that code is so concise and elegant, it gives me tingles. If anyone IS a 10x engineer, it’d surely have to be Norvig.
Uncle Bob tried and failed to use his own strategy of many small functions to solve sudoku. There’s been a lot of Trough of Disillusionment talk about him lately. My impression of him is that he’s got the right code organization idea but for the wrong reasons, and so his ends often don’t justify his means. It’s a common pattern in software to guess the wrong reasons why something works, and then overfitting to the wrong reasons.