"best" is a relative term, but in terms of technology we all use every day I would say either Linus Torvalds or Jeff Dean are up there among the best for sure
Sort of, the one who, when left stranded on a desert island, would make a CPU out of sand, write software for it, including the entire TCP/IP stack, and email someone to come get them.
You'd have to come up with the criteria for "best" but as an old hacker, "from MIT or Bell Labs" comes to mind as where to look. Maybe some of their spinoffs, but those sites did amazing things with basically nothing.
Yeah. Andy Tanenbaum described studying at MIT as "drinking from a fire hose". Do we have someone who both got their degree from MIT and worked at Bell Labs? That'd be an interesting combo.
Nasir Gebelli. Wrote Apple 2 games by dictating bytes typed into the mini-assembler, went on to write/co-design the early Final Fantasy titles. Legend.
You will never know, for all they do is delete and refactor.
Any of the top coders from the major demoscenes.
Mike Evanston
RMS
In case you weren't being ironic, his C code was journeyman-like in the 80s and positively atrocious by modern standards.