"Superclass - 14 of the world’s best living programmers"


When developers discuss who the world’s top programmer is, these names tend to 
come up ..

By Phil Johnson  http://www.arnnet.com.au/slideshow/549441/


* Jon Skeet 

Main claim to fame: Legendary Stack Overflow contributor

Credentials: Google engineer and author of C# in Depth. Holds highest 
reputation score of all time on Stack Overflow, answering, on average, more 
than 425 questions per month.

Quotes: “Jon Skeet doesn't need a debugger, he just stares down the bug until 
the code confesses” Steven A. Lowe

“When Jon Skeet's code fails to compile, the compiler apologises.” Anonymous

“Jon Skeet's code doesn't follow a coding convention. It is the coding 
convention.” Anonymous


* Gennady Korotkevich 

Main claim to fame: Competitive programming prodigy

Credentials: Youngest participant ever (age 11) and 6 time gold medalist 
(2007-2012) in the International Olympiad in Informatics. Part of the winning 
team at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in 2013 and winner 
of the 2014 Facebook Hacker Cup. At the time of this writing, ranked first by 
Codeforces (handle: Tourist) and second among algorithm competitors by TopCoder.

Quotes: “A programming prodigy!” Prateek Joshi

“Gennady is definitely amazing, and visible example of why I have a large 
development team in Belarus.” Chris Howard

“Tourist is genius” Nuka Shrinivas Rao


* Linus Torvalds 

Main claim to fame: Creator of Linux 

Credentials: Created the Linux kernel and Git, an open source version control 
system. Winner of numerous awards and honors, including the EFF Pioneer Award 
in 1998, the British Computer Society’s Lovelace Medal in 2000, the Millenium 
Technology Prize in 2012 and the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Pioneer Award 
in 2014. Also inducted into the Computer History Museum’s Hall of Fellows in 
2008 and the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.

Quote: “He's pretty darn good.” Alok Tripathy


* Jeff Dean 

Main claim to fame: The brains behind Google search indexing

Credentials: Helped to design and implement many of Google’s large-scale 
distributed systems, including website crawling, indexing and searching, 
AdSense, MapReduce, BigTable and Spanner. Elected to the National Academy of 
Engineering in 2009. 2012 winner of the ACM’s SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award and the 
ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences.

Quotes: “... for bringing breakthroughs in data mining( GFS, Map and Reduce, 
Big Table ).” Natu Lauchande

“... conceived, built, and deployed MapReduce and BigTable, among a bazillion 
other things” Erik Goldman


* John Carmack 

Main claim to fame: Creator of Doom

Credentials: Cofounded id Software and created such influential FPS games as 
Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. Pioneered such ground-breaking computer graphic 
techniques adaptive tile refresh, binary space partitioning and surface 
caching. Inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of 
Fame in 2001 and given a lifetime achievement award by the Game Developers 
Choice Awards in 2010.

Quotes: “... Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake were revolutionary at the time and 
have influenced a generation of game designers.” dniblock

“He can write basically anything in a weekend....” Greg Naughton

“He is the Mozart of computer coding….” Chris Morris


* Richard Stallman 

Main claim to fame: Creator of Emacs

Credentials: Founded the GNU Project and created many of its core tools, such 
as Emacs, GCC, GDB and GNU Make. Also founded the Free Software Foundation. 
Winner of the ACM's Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1990 and the EFF's Pioneer 
Award in 1998.

Quotes: “... there was the time when he single-handedly outcoded several of the 
best Lisp hackers around, in the Symbolics vs LMI fight.” Srinivasan Krishnan

“I might disagree on many things with the great man, but he is still one of the 
most important programmers, alive or dead” Marko Poutiainen


* Petr Mitrechev 

Main claim to fame: One of the top competitive programmers of all time

Credentials: Two-time gold medal winner in the International Olympiad in 
Informatics (2000, 2002). In 2006, won the Google Code Jam and was also the 
TopCoder Open Algorithm champion. Also, two-time winner of the Facebook Hacker 
Cup (2011, 2013). At the time of this writing, the top ranked algorithm 
competitor on TopCoder (handle: Petr) and ranked fifth by Codeforces

Quote: “He is an idol in competitive programming even here in India…” Kavish 
Dwivedi


* Fabrice Bellard 

Main claim to fame: Creator of QEMU

Credentials: Created a variety of well-known open-source software programs, 
including QEMU, a platform for hardware emulation and virtualization, FFmpeg 
(for handling multimedia data), the Tiny C Compiler and LZEXE, an executable 
file compressor. Winner of the Obfuscated C Code Contest in 2000 and 2001 and 
the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2011. Former world record holder for 
calculating the most number of digits in Pi.

Quotes: “I find Fabrice Bellard's work remarkable and impressive.” raphinou

“Fabrice Bellard is the most productive programmer in the world....” Pavan Yara

“Hes like the Nikola Tesla of sofware engineering.” Michael Valladolid


* Doug Cutting 

Main claim to fame: Creator of Lucene

Credentials: Developed the Lucene search engine, as well as Nutch, a web 
crawler, and Hadoop, a set of tools for distributed processing of large data 
sets. A strong proponent of open-source (Lucene, Nutch and Hadoop are all 
open-source). Currently a director of the Apache Software Foundation.

Quotes: “... he is the same guy who has written an exceptional search 
framework(lucene/solr) and opened the big-data gateway to the world(hadoop).” 
Rajesh Rao

“His creation/work on Lucene and Hadoop (among other projects) has created a 
tremendous amount of wealth and employment for folks in the world….” Amit 
Nithianandan


* Donald Knuth 

Main claim to fame: Author of The Art of Computer Programming

Credentials: Wrote the definitive book on the theory of programming. Created 
the TeX digital typesetting system. First winner of the ACM’s Grace Murray 
Hopper Award in 1971. Winner of the ACM’s A. M. Turing Award in 1974, the 
National Medal of Science in 1979 and the IEEE’s John von Neumann Medal in 
1995. Named a Fellow at the Computer History Museum in 1998.

Quote: “There is only one large computer program I have used in which there are 
to a decent approximation 0 bugs: Don Knuth's TeX.” Jaap Weel


* Anders Hejlsberg 

Main claim to fame: Creator of Turbo Pascal

Credentials: The original author of what became Turbo Pascal, one of the most 
popular Pascal compilers and the first integrated development environment. 
Later, led the building of Delphi, Turbo Pascal’s successor. Chief designer and 
architect of C#. Winner of Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award in 2001.

Quote: “I revere this guy - he created the development tools that were my 
favourite through three key periods along my path to becoming a professional 
software engineer.” Stefan Kiryazov

* Ken Thompson 

Main claim to fame: Creator of Unix

Credentials: Co-creator, along with Dennis Ritchie, of Unix. Creator of B 
programming language, the UTF-8 character encoding scheme, ed text editor and 
co-developer of the Go programming language. Co-winner (along with Ritchie) of 
the A.M. Turing Award in 1983, IEEE Computer Pioneer Award in 1994 and the 
National Medal of Technology in 1998. Inducted as a fellow of the Computer 
History Museum in 1997.

Quote: “... probably the most accomplished programmer ever. Unix kernel, Unix 
tools, world champion chess program Belle, Plan 9, Go Language.” Pete 
Prokopowicz


* Adam D'Angelo 

Main claim to fame: Co-founder of Quora

Credentials: As an engineer at Facebook, built initial infrastructure for its 
news feed. Went on to become CTO and VP of engineering at Facebook, before 
leaving to co-found Quora. Eighth place finisher at the USA Computing Olympiad 
as a high school student in 2001. Member of California Institute of 
Technology’s silver medal winning team at the ACM International Collegiate 
Programming Contest in 2004. Finalist in the Algorithm Coding Competition of 
Topcoder Collegiate Challenge in 2005.

Quotes: “An "All-Rounder" Programmer.” Anonymous

"For every good thing I make he has like six." Mark Zuckerberg


* Sanjay Ghemawat 

Main claim to fame: Key Google architect

Credentials: Helped to design and implement some of Google’s large distributed 
systems, including MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner and Google File System. Created 
Unix’s ical calendaring system. Elected to the National Academy of Engineering 
in 2009. Winner of the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences 
in 2012.

Quote: “Jeff Dean's wingman.” Ahmet Alp Balkan


--
Cheers,
Stephen
                                          
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