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Comment by attractivechaos | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't explain why so few people of Fabrice's generation have reached his level. Think about violin playing. Many players can become professionals if they have the obsession, but 99% of them won't reach the Heifetz/Hadelich/Ehnes level no matter how hard they try. Talent matters. Programming is not much different from performing art.

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I think this is well covered by his first line:

> the main thing you need is free time and obsession (and money for your free time btw).

Free time (and money for your free time) is a privilege not everyone may have had. Also, access to computers which, don't forget, has only become ubiquitous this century, and sadly not always in the form that might encourage experimentation. Without getting too much into the Nature-Nurture debate, talent and obsession sadly won't go anywhere without the proper environment to cultivate it. You don't become Bellard/Knuth/Dijkstra with just a bunch of rocks[1] and a whole host of other concerns on top.

[1] https://xkcd.com/505/

That doesn't cover OP's point, some people's brains just work differently and they can achieve something in 1000x less time than others. You can have all the time in the world and you'll never reach their level. That's essentially what talent is.

I have been thinking what talent means in programming and thought of a case in the past. The task was to parse a text file format. One programmer used ~1000 lines of code (LOC) with complex logic. The other used <200 LOC with a straightforward solution that ran times faster and would probably be more extensible and easier to maintain in future. This is a small task. The difference will be exponentially amplified for complex projects that Fabrice is famous for. The first programmer in my story may be able to write a javascript runtime if he has time + obsession, but it will take him much longer and the quality will be much lower in comparison to quickjs or mqjs.

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