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Lately I have been learning of more and more programmers who think that if they were working alone, they would be faster and would deliver more quality. Usually that feeling is attached to a feeling that they do the best programming in their team and at the end of the day the idea is quite plausible. If they ARE doing the best programming, and worked alone (and more maybe) the final result would be a better piece of software.

I know this idea would only work if you were passionate enough to work 24/7, on a deadline, with great discipline.

So after considering the idea and trying to learn a little more, I wonder if there are famous one-man-army programmers that have delivered any (useful) software in the past?

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    Net productivity drops when hours go to high. Don't assume the best of the best are there merely because they invest more time. If that were the case, anyone could become a great programmer. – Brian Feb 09 '09 at 20:31
  • @Brian, well yea, i kind of a agree, but your know being persistent and giving a lot of time to (learning and developing) programming is a huge part of the key element of all the famous software – DFectuoso Feb 09 '09 at 20:41
  • Wow it will be interesting who of this guys will get more votes, its quite an impressive list – DFectuoso Feb 09 '09 at 21:00
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    Most of the answers are wrong. Anders didn't build C# or Turbo Pascal all by himself, for example. – Robert S. Feb 10 '09 at 02:01
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    Its weird that the number of votes to close is constant, while this question have 22 up votes and 14 favs, it only needs 4 votes to have it closed huh? – DFectuoso Feb 10 '09 at 17:21
  • @Brian: "Net productivity drops when hours go to high"... that's a statistical truth but there's no reason it's a universal one. Passion makes hours fly by. –  Feb 18 '10 at 15:06
  • I offer these counterpoints to your assertions/assumptions: 1. A lot more programmers /believe/ they do better work than their colleagues than /actually/ do. 2. Inflated egos can be the reason they prefer to work alone. 3. It is a truly rare individual who is insanely smart, incredibly productive, and is well liked by the people who work with her/him. – dthorpe Feb 13 '11 at 04:04
  • @DFectuoso -- perhaps you could bring this up in one of the "meta" questions like this one [here][1] [1][http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/2389/how-long-will-this-forum-survive-if-the-moderators-keep-closing-questions]. – James Anderson Oct 12 '11 at 01:40

111 Answers111

273

John Carmack

The guy that wrote the engine for the Doom games, Wolfenstein, the Quake games, etc. Read Masters of Doom, it is a great history of what he and John Romero have done.

Jamie Penney
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    Just don't ask about Daikatana :) – tsilb Feb 09 '09 at 23:12
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    Daikatana was done by Romero after he left iD, don't think there was much Carmack involved ;-) –  Feb 09 '09 at 23:17
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    Carmack wasn't involved with Daikatana at all. That was Romero and his own company. Read Masters of Doom, you'll find Romero did some pretty good work in the beginning. – Jamie Penney Feb 10 '09 at 00:19
  • So its not really fair to say Carmack was a one man army. –  Feb 10 '09 at 01:19
  • Romero didn't do any of the graphics engine stuff AFAIK. That was purely Carmack. – Jamie Penney Feb 10 '09 at 02:58
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    I used to read J. Carmack's blog/finger posts in the early 90's and what few papers he wrote... He is and still one of the Einsteins of video game engines and he's literally a rocket scientist :) – David Feb 10 '09 at 05:44
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    I would agree, think John Carmack will voted for one of the best programmers out there. –  Feb 10 '09 at 07:20
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    Carmack's games are as games rather dull but his programming is somewhere near insanely impressive and godlike so his name has to be upvoted. –  Feb 10 '09 at 07:41
  • i ve read wiki, he is great –  Feb 10 '09 at 11:21
  • @Esko "Carmack's games are as games rather dull but his programming.." I'd say yes, but they're dull in an attractive way. – mlvljr Apr 02 '10 at 10:06
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    Carmack is also building sub-orbital spacecrafts. Rocket science is actually *not* rocket science for him... – elmattic Oct 27 '10 at 12:03
  • Is that a one-man show? He cooperated a lot with other people to get stuff done, for example he worked with Michael Abrash o the first Quake engine.. – Nils Feb 13 '11 at 10:54
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Donald Knuth

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    Indeed. He wrote every line of code of TeX himself, and I believe the same is true of Metafont as well. [He often have discussions with other people about important decisions, but all the code was written alone.] – ShreevatsaR Feb 10 '09 at 04:50
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    oh. don't forget that he wrote TeX ON PAPER in a notebook completely then just 'typed it in'... oh and he invented a new style (Literate programming) in the process too. – Kevin Won Feb 18 '10 at 04:12
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    +1 Knuth - it easy to overlook that the second word of The Art of Computer Programming is "art" when the whole book is an extremely dense manifesto of highly efficient data structures and algorithms. But it really and truly is an art form rather than a science or engineering discipline. –  Feb 18 '10 at 04:19
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    Can't afford not to upvote any question where Don is the answer – vrdhn Feb 13 '11 at 11:53
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    Also: Any guy that pays for his own mistakes (literally! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check ) is awesome in my book. He takes the concept of "one man army" to 11. – Dan Esparza Oct 05 '11 at 16:38
163

Steve Wozniak pretty much was apple's programming staff for the first bit.

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  • can't believe I didn't think of the Woz. +1 – Matt Briggs Feb 09 '09 at 20:50
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    He designed their early hardware too. – Bill the Lizard Feb 09 '09 at 20:55
  • Woz did some of the early Apple programming, but he was really a hardware guy. –  Feb 10 '09 at 01:24
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    His book 'iWoz' is an interesting read. He is one of the greatest *inventors* of his era. –  Feb 10 '09 at 06:38
  • Honestly I can't help feeling that Apple at that time were not very special or even very innovative. I am almost sure there were greater minds at other companies. Woz has just been boosted by modern day Apple hype, mythology and in part history fabrication. – kotlinski Feb 10 '09 at 23:26
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    I remember Woz being known as pretty hot stuff back in the 80s so if it's hype, it's been going on a loooooong time. –  Feb 17 '09 at 07:36
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    'Some of' the early software? In the Apple ][ with Integer BASIC, practically every byte was by Wozniak, IIRC. I don't know of any other personal computer ever sold for which that was true. –  Feb 04 '10 at 05:53
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    Legend has it Woz hand-assembled Integer BASIC into 6502 machine code using pencil and paper, then typed those bytes into the Apple II monitor software, which has also designed, and then saved those bytes to a cassette interface, which he also designed. All so that he could implement Atari Breakout in BASIC to show off at the hobby club. – Darren Feb 12 '11 at 23:27
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    @Darren: that's more than legend. I've seen a photocopy of part of it -- all hand-written assembly code, with machine code (also hand written) next to it. The thing to keep in mind, however, is that at the time that wasn't terribly rare (I did the same several times). – Jerry Coffin Feb 13 '11 at 03:22
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Richard M. Stallman (RMS). While known recently for political rants about closed source software, in his day he was quite the programmer. He single handedly kept up with commercial lisp machine code for quite some time. Emacs and gcc are some of the things he created.

There's a great description of him in the book in Hackers by Steven Levy.

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  • That's a great book! –  Feb 09 '09 at 22:19
  • I liked his work with emacs, but it is too bad I haven't heard about any other projects. –  Feb 10 '09 at 07:17
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    Berlin: like gcc, gdb and make? –  Feb 10 '09 at 07:26
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    RMS was a one man army keeping up with commercial LISP machines only because he was the only one nuts enough and able to do it :) He did the initial emacs on his own because the concept was just too complex to articulate to anyone else.. but after that, he happily worked with others. – Tim Post Mar 04 '09 at 04:39
  • I didn't realize he wrote gcc as well. Learn something new every day. – Jason Baker Mar 07 '09 at 00:38
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    In his defense, Symbolics people would design Lisp machines probably sitting around offices and tables, allowing RMS to hack up imitations on MIT systems of their designs and feature decisions. He would become a one-man army again to keep Emacs apace with the XEmacs fork. –  Mar 24 '09 at 19:23
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    http://xkcd.com/225/ – Jason Jun 19 '09 at 08:33
  • Even the original MIT Emacs was a collaborative effort, incorporating the work of many developers in an extended community. One of the early "open source" efforts, as Emacs was only distributed with the source. – John Saunders Feb 12 '11 at 22:43
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Chris Sawyer. He had a little help with music and graphics, but otherwise RollerCoaster Tycoon was all him. Amazing, especially given the physics engine. Last but not least, the entire game was written in assembly language.

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    Don't forget Transport Tycoon, which probably has a bigger cult following than RCT. –  Feb 09 '09 at 20:38
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    All in assembly too! – Malfist Feb 09 '09 at 20:41
  • @Chris: And I was in my 30's and playing that game. Are you trying to make some of us feel old? –  Feb 09 '09 at 21:34
  • I just thought that Chris was like 15 now until I checked his profile. Someone stole some years somewhere. ;) –  Feb 09 '09 at 22:34
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    Fastest gun in the West --- you beat me by 5 seconds :) Good thing you added the thing about assembler --- that's what I still find the most striking thing :D –  Feb 10 '09 at 07:13
  • Erik: Indeed, just look at OpenTTD. –  Feb 10 '09 at 07:52
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    That OpenTTD exists is a testament to how enjoyable Transport Tycoon was. –  Feb 10 '09 at 15:34
  • Is it sad that I still play that game from time to time? –  Feb 11 '09 at 18:44
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    Had no idea that was built with ASM. Amazing. –  Feb 12 '09 at 06:35
  • is there any reason other than "because I can" he ever gave for doing it in ASM??? – Epaga Feb 12 '09 at 10:40
  • Because computers were slow back then, and this game didnt use a videocard to make fast moving first person roller coasters! –  Feb 13 '09 at 17:49
  • Simucal++. I remember TTD as one of the most stable games I could play on my mid-range Win95 Pentium 1. Running in a fullsize DOS window, I remember it hanging *once*, total loss of keyboard and mouse - for about six minutes. Then it just came back to life and carried on trucking. Unbelievable. – Gaurav Feb 13 '09 at 17:52
  • +1 Erik for 1st person to mention Transport Tycoon. I *loved* that game liked 10 years ago and had the urge to play it a year ago, so installed it and played it - still good :) –  May 11 '09 at 10:43
  • Wow, I loved RCT, I can't believe it was done in assembly. I need to go play it again just based on that fact! –  May 14 '10 at 02:55
  • Written in what?! –  Feb 13 '11 at 00:06
  • He wrote that in assembly?! Jesus Christ. I think I need to go boil my brain now. – Maxpm Feb 13 '11 at 00:49
  • OpenTTD development is pretty impressive as well-- it was all started by one guy who disassembled the game and translated the *entire* thing into C. – sysrqb Feb 13 '11 at 01:49
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Linus Torvalds

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    Linus is more of a manager type then pure dev. the first revision of linux really sucked, it was only after he got others involved that it got good – Matt Briggs Feb 09 '09 at 20:40
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    Exactly. Git is the same way. Linus needs a team :) –  Feb 09 '09 at 20:47
  • ditto, and Linus would be the first to tell you where his strengths lie, and dev is not his best skill. Great guy, btw. – jro Feb 09 '09 at 20:47
  • Agreed - but there's no disputing that he's famous and has delivered useful software :) – Andy Mikula Feb 09 '09 at 21:17
  • Development _is_ a good skill of Linus. He designed and wrote the initial version of Git in about 2 weeks, which was functional. –  Feb 09 '09 at 23:00
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    Linus doesn't belong here... he doesn't believe in one-man-army programmers –  Feb 10 '09 at 01:51
  • "the first revision of linux really sucked" If you look at the original code I agree. It is suck a mess and probably still hurts the Linux kernel today. And I still wonder if the monolithic approach was the best way to go. –  Feb 10 '09 at 07:21
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    Well, Linus _is_ the army. Whatever he starts, the huge army appears out of nowhere and produces something huge. So, no Linus, no army :) – Marko Feb 10 '09 at 15:41
  • Linus wrote his initial kernel on his own because only he appreciated the monolithic design at the time. Once it was out, he happily welcomed other contributors. I think the OP wants examples of a consistent one man army .. someone who just _always_ wants to work alone. – Tim Post Mar 04 '09 at 04:41
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    Linus's success is based on not being a one-man-army. The GPL was a very important decision of his. –  Mar 24 '09 at 19:24
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    http://xkcd.com/225/ – Jason Jun 19 '09 at 08:34
  • @tinkertim - there are no such people. Working with others and being ready to compromise is as improtant as programming knowledge itself. The ones you think that always work alone are just the ones that were much more in the spotlight, so you never thought about the others. –  Aug 26 '09 at 14:39
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Bill Joy - wrote vi as well as csh, rlogin, rsh, and rcp

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    Someone buy that man a dictionary! –  Feb 09 '09 at 20:54
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    Some might consider those programs to be a good reason to use the word infamous instead. Or at least vi and csh. ;) – Chris Charabaruk Feb 09 '09 at 23:33
  • Wasn't Java developed by James Gosling? – Bruce Alderman Feb 20 '09 at 15:13
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    Not to mention the TCP/IP stack for BSD: http://archive.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/index2.html –  Oct 01 '09 at 01:46
  • @Chris Charabaruk: try doing some editing with ed sometime. It's not everybody's cup of tea by any means, but Vi is still a *tremendous* improvement over its predecessors (and not a few of its would-be successors as well). – Jerry Coffin Feb 13 '11 at 03:25
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Just for completeness (not really competitive with today's programming "heros", but truly a "one-man-army" in her times ;-): Ada Lovelace

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John Resig, creator of the jQuery javascript framework.

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Guido van Rossum (author of Python)

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    How can Guido be considered a one-man-army? In my view he is a great collaborator. –  Feb 13 '11 at 00:00
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    For the most part Guido was alone on Python for 10 years, codeswarm show when it picks up: http://vimeo.com/1093745 – Ryan Christensen Feb 13 '11 at 11:55
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Larry Wall - Perl.

And for a fun trip to see what goes in that fabulous mind of his , C programmers can read the winning entry in the international C obfuscation contest in 1986. It's filed under wall.c

  • He also wrote patch and rn, iirc –  Feb 09 '09 at 23:19
  • I couldn't compile wall.c properly. Work for anybody else: –  Feb 12 '11 at 22:45
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    I hardly think Larry Wall considers himself the sole author of perl. There's a big community of contributors *guided* by Larry Wall, same with Guido and Python. If you meant Perl 1.0, then maybe, I don't know how many major contributors apart from Wall there was at the time. –  Feb 12 '11 at 23:54
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Anders Hejlsberg creator of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# (and partly .NET), ....

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Bram Cohen, at least his little project is now causing 50% of all internet traffic[citation needed].

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  • OOO, these are all good. –  Feb 10 '09 at 07:18
  • Can you use bittorrent for anything but getting CDs and movies. –  Feb 10 '09 at 07:19
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    you can use it for anything that needs to be transported to people. – Svish Feb 10 '09 at 08:34
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    Yes, BitTorrent is used for example by Blizzard to distribute their World of Warcraft Patches or digital downloads from their online store. Also, Linux distributions use it for their DVDs. I will use it for my stuff because 4 GB Webspace is $$$. – Michael Stum Feb 10 '09 at 11:49
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    @svish - I'd like a chocolate bar please, can you seed? – AShelly Feb 10 '09 at 20:10
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    Facebook uses BitTorrent to push their 1GB+ compiled binaries to their servers. – Paperjam Oct 11 '11 at 22:12
  • 1 GB Compiled Binaries? Holy cow, do they ship an entire OS Image? (Which isn't unreasonable, it's a different form of netboot) – Michael Stum Oct 11 '11 at 22:15
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Bjarne Stroustrup for the invention and 1st implementation of C++

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    Yet another who's really much more a collaborator than a one-man-army. *The Design and Evolution of C++* lists *many* contributors going all the way back to the very beginning. – Jerry Coffin Feb 13 '11 at 03:27
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Yukihiro Matsumoto did deliver a lot of Ruby all by himself. Ruby's popular now, and lots of people have contributed to it, but he did single-handedly start the ball rolling.

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Oren Eini aka Ayende Rahien, author of Rhino Mocks and other great open source tools. His is some of the best and most elegant code around.

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DJ Bernstein. qmail, djbdns, and many many others.

Oh, and suing the United States so people here can freely publish cryptography tools on the Internet. Not exactly programming, but totally one-man-army.

  • djb's a great entry; I'm not sure how many of the other entries are "one-man-army" programmers, but it's certainly something djb is noted for. Or so I've heard tell on the interwebs. – Gaurav Feb 13 '09 at 18:07
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    djb is one of those people you want to lock in a room and let code. The man is a walking flame war when talking to others, but the guy sure has some talent. – jer Feb 13 '11 at 01:11
  • Check out some of his lecture notes (on his site). I so want to take is class. –  Feb 13 '11 at 01:51
59

Jon Skeet

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This is one of those great programmers who doesn't have the "Knuth" fame - Fabrice Bellard. He wrote the original FFmpeg distribution, is the project leader for QEMU, discovered the fastest current pi algorithm, and has not one, but two, wins in the The International Obfuscated C Code Contest. To use a line from one of my favorite CS professors, the man is a rock star.

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    Two decades ago, he also wrote a program used by many MS-DOS programmers: LZEXE. It's like PKLITE (or UPX, these days), but he was definitely a pioneer. – C. K. Young May 21 '09 at 03:39
  • I just love the "Make a X-Window configuration that is a DVB-T transmitter" project - http://bellard.org/dvbt/. Just getting the _idea_! –  Feb 20 '11 at 09:23
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    After seeing his Linux that runs *inside the browser*, I had to give this a +1. http://bellard.org/jslinux/ – Mark Ransom May 18 '11 at 02:32
50

Jamie Zawinski (links to one of the most epic stories in the history of computer science)

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_why's self-portrait

_why has contributed some cool stuff to the Ruby community :

... and many more :)

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Read this article for example, starting twowards the middle at about the place where it says,

... the privately held company Celera appeared on the verge of beating the combined scientific teams of the rest of the world to the goal of sequencing the human genome. Celera's approach was less rigorous but faster than the Human Genome Project's approach, and for a very understandable reason: Celera's goal was not to advance science but to win the race by any means fair or foul and thereby claim what would have been the most astonishing conquistadorial prize in human history. For had Celera won the race to sequence the genome, and had it filed patents aggressively, it is conceivable that one tiny company could have laid claim to royalties on virtually all medical progress thenceforward. Nay, they could have claimed proprietary interest in the evolutionary future of the human race.

Never mind that the proposition was more ludicrous, on the face of it, than a private company's laying claim to the moon. The threat was real, and scientists were scared.

This state of affairs was remedied by the heroic efforts of a once obscure University of California at Santa Cruz biology graduate student named Jim Kent, who, over the course of 40 days of coding so furiously that he literally had to soak his wrists in ice baths every night, wrote a program to assemble and make public the Human Genome Project's own map. He completed the task one day ahead of Celera.

Kent's stealth attack thereby beat Celera at its own game virtually single-handedly, in a feat that deserves to become as iconic as Watson and Crick's.

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Steve Gibson

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Sid Meier

Co-founded Microprose and wrote Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, and Sid Meier's Colonization,[2][3], Sid Meier's Civilization IV and a bunch more

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  • I don't know about the others, but I'm pretty sure he didn't have much to do with Civ2. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_II – Gaurav Feb 13 '09 at 18:11
  • +1: Civ IV was and still is the best video game i've ever played. Do you know it a V is coming out? –  Feb 13 '09 at 18:12
  • @Gaurav. Looks like you're right on. – asp316 Feb 13 '09 at 19:52
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    He didn't write Alpha Centauri by himself, either. He became famous for writing Civ 1, and it seems like he has mostly done collaboration/team management since then. –  Jul 22 '09 at 14:15
  • he was already stated "upstairs" :) –  Aug 26 '09 at 14:42
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    This is like giving Bill Gates credit for Windows 7... Sid Meier is more a manager than anything else. With recent games, it seems like his name is just a brand... –  Jan 12 '10 at 01:55
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    @Bob. The question was - a one man army ...wrote software in the past...Not, was the latest piece of software written solely by this person... – asp316 Jan 12 '10 at 06:26
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    Is there any evidence that he wrote Civ by himself? And if he did, due to preference rather than necessity? That's what this thread is about. – Kirk Broadhurst Mar 25 '10 at 12:58
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Chuck Moore - Created Forth, ported it to dozens of architectures, designed several microprocessors, made his own CAD system, earned millions on hardware patents, created colorForth... and so on.

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Phil Katz absolutely deserves mention. Where would we have been without PKZip.

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This isn't just a feeling, this is the an article in the 20th anniversary edition of a book by Frederick Brooks called The Mythical Man Month. This is actually, I would guess, a very frequent situation. The personality of a software developer leads itself to being somewhat independent anyways. I don't know of prime examples, but you may be interested in the book I linked above.

  • You're not far off, but the theme of MMM is "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later," also known as Brooks law. – Bill the Lizard Feb 09 '09 at 20:42
  • The "No Silver Bullet" article in MMM says: "Study after study shows that the very best designers produce structures that are faster, smaller, simpler, cleaner, and produced with less effort. The differences between the great and the average approach an order of magnitude." – Esko Luontola Feb 09 '09 at 21:10
  • It's actually only the theme of that one essay. –  Feb 09 '09 at 23:36
  • But it's the one everyone remembers! –  Feb 10 '09 at 05:09
  • First, the theme of NSB is "that there will be no more technologies or practices that will serve as "silver bullets" and create a twofold improvement in programmer productivity over two years". Second, that article didn't even appear in the original MMM. It got added to the 20th anniversary edition. – Bill the Lizard Feb 10 '09 at 13:08
  • I give! So noted. –  Feb 10 '09 at 13:14
  • @David: Sorry, I didn't mean to get so pedantic on you. :) – Bill the Lizard Feb 10 '09 at 13:46
  • great book, I`ve enjoyed it a lot –  Jun 19 '09 at 08:48
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John Backus - Fortran

Stephen Wolfram - Mathematica package

Sid Meier - Civilization

Tim Berners-Lee - inventor of World Wide Web

Phil Zimmermann - PGP

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  • Wow Civilization is a great game, cant imagine doing all that with just 1 guy... amazing – DFectuoso Feb 09 '09 at 22:34
  • I never followed the sequels, but the first one was always credited to him. –  Feb 09 '09 at 22:52
  • 3 downvotes with no comment. Really tells something about the character of a person. Besides, what in the world could have bothered them in a list like this, is beyond me ... –  Oct 17 '09 at 16:34
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Gus Mueller.

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Khaled Mardam-Bey, author of mIRC, the famous IRC client.

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In the gaming world:

  • Jon Van Caneghem - Known for the Might and Magic series, he single-handedly wrote, designed and developed the first entry in the series, with just a little help for artwork.
  • Dan Bunten - Created M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold and a variety of other games, again, back in the early days when game designers were one-man (and, come 1992 for her, one-woman) armies.
  • Bill Budge - Created Pinball Construction Set, alongside many other games. From scratch. Himself. A great Gamasutra piece on PCS's legacy was published recently.

Not to mention all the Atari alumni who went on to Activision. Remember: In the early days, these were all one-man jobs.

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    A lot of early games were one-man-shows. The last couple assembly language games I worked on had 3 or 4 people. This was before source control and we had nightmarish Friday code integrations. –  Feb 10 '09 at 03:00
  • GAH! I can't even IMAGINE! – John Rudy Feb 10 '09 at 19:46
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Bram Moolenaar -- wrote almost all of VIM by himself :]

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John McCarthy -- wrote the first version of lisp

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    ICBW, but I thought he designed it as a language to run on a chalkboard. One/more of his students surprised him by actually implementing it. – Alister Bulman Apr 10 '09 at 19:37
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    +1 - the original implementation of 'eval' was done by a grad student. –  Jun 19 '09 at 08:43
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    That grad student was Steve Russell, and it was for the IBM 704. He's also the creator of Spacewar!, one of the first video games. –  Feb 12 '11 at 22:40
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Nick Bradbury. He wrote HomeSite, TopStyle, and FeedDemon. All three programs top notch. Plus, he pays a lot of attention to his users - that can't be easy for a one-man shop.

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Joe Hewitt, creator of Firebug and DOM Inspector.

I love Firebug. It made web page debugging way easier.

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I can't believe I'm the first person to mention this:

Alan Turing

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Simon Tatham wrote PuTTY. Arguably, one of the most popular [citation needed] windows SSH clients.

Matt Wright wrote a lot of (in)famous Perl scripts that are still in use.

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Markus Frind CEO of Plentyoffish.com

One man show . Created one of largest dating site by himself using asp.net Gross upwards of 30k day .

11

Al Gore - He wrote the entire Internet!

JohnFx
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    Aww, c'mon. It was a fluff question. Fluff answers should get some love too. – JohnFx Mar 04 '09 at 23:33
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    They're just trying to reward you with a Peer Pressure badge. :) – chaos Mar 11 '09 at 03:11
  • I already have it, so it is safe to upvote me now. =) I can spare the 3 rep points for a chance to take a jab at Mr. Green McGreeny. It was worth it. – JohnFx Mar 11 '09 at 17:48
  • And it was demagnetized by Stephen Hawking (c IT Crowd S3E4 The Speech)! –  Dec 17 '10 at 00:44
10

There are so many great answers here, but I'll add in my own suggestions, and these come from the 1980's heydays of computer games on the Commodore 64:

Andrew Braybrook (Paradroid, Morpheus, Gribbly's Day Out)

Archer MacLean (Jimmy White's Snooker, Dropzone)

Stavros Fasoulas (Sanxion, Delta)

Martin Walker (Citadel)

Jon Hare/Chris Yates (aka Sensible Software) (Wizball, Sensible Soccer)

Ok, that last one is more of a "two-man" army, however, many of these guys worked (mostly) alone, coded mostly in assembler (6510) and also did sound, music and graphics all by themselves.

(Useless trivia - My gravatar is Gribbly Grobbly from Gribbly's day out!)

CraigTP
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  • The Morpheus diary: http://www.zzap64.co.uk/mentalprocre.html –  Feb 09 '09 at 21:54
  • For those curious on what you can do in 64 Kb, Paradroid is available for the Wii. –  Oct 12 '11 at 06:14
  • Also check out what can be done in only [1k (yes! 1k) of RAM](http://www.pouet.net/search.php?what=1k&type=prod&x=0&y=0) – CraigTP Oct 13 '11 at 08:41
10

Richard Greenblatt, wrote much stuff at MIT AI Lab, including chess program, Lisp Machine, etc. etc.

Mike Dunlavey
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    Also mentioned in the book hackers, by Steven Levy. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative! – tsilb Feb 09 '09 at 23:14
10

Has anyone mentioned Gary Kildall (CP/M) or are you guys too young to remember?

psant
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10

Shawn Fanning, creator of Napster.

Lurker Indeed
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9

Charles Babbage - Originator of the concept of a programmable computer.

Dhaust
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9

Walter Bright was once a one-man show for several years when it came to Digital Mars' C++ compiler. He also started the D language and wrote a C++ version of Empire by himself (later ported it to D).

8

Wil Shipley of Delicious Library - http://www.delicious-monster.com/company.php

Benny Wong
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  • when he worked at OMNI, we wrote OmniPDF in like 3 or 4 days. Adobe and others offered him big buckets of money, but he did not accept. http://blog.wilshipley.com/ –  Feb 12 '11 at 23:03
8

Markus Persson (aka Notch) for Minecraft.

Bill the Lizard
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7

Derek Smart of Battlecruiser 3000AD was pretty big in his day. Apparently he was pretty good at flame wars too...

Mike Robinson
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  • Good at flame wars and fighting vending machines, if that old story is true. – Chris Charabaruk Feb 09 '09 at 23:35
  • It's not, to the best of my knowledge (re: vending machine), which may well be poor. Also, Do. Not. Mention. The. Phd. Except in reverence. If Cleve would finish Grimoire he would belong in the clown category too. ;) –  Feb 10 '09 at 13:25
7

Juan Valdez. Ok, he did't wrote a single line of code. But he helped to code most of apps that we use today.

Jonathan
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6

Paul Vixie.

chaos
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Matthew Smith, wrote Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy all on his lonesome.

Mark Rendle
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6

My $0.02: Cleve Moler - original author of MATLAB.

gnovice
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6

Steve Streeting whom created Ogre3D, the Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine.

Kieran Senior
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6

Simon Peyton Jones - Functional programming researcher and original author of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler.

Jared Updike
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5

Shaun Inman I guess he was solo

Ayyash
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5

Pixel - Cave Story

kotlinski
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5

Doug Cutting

Started Lucene, started Nutch, created Hadoop after Google publish there paper on Map Reduce...

5

Eugene Roshal for creation of FAR file manager, RAR file format and WinRAR file archiver.

Mark Zuckerberg for creation of Facebook.

z-boss
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5

Al Lowe for Leisure Suit Larry series :) Will Wright for SimCity and finally David Braben for Elite

Perhaps Ron Gilbert should also get a mention for bringing the world Monkey Island (tm)

5

D. Richard Hipp for SQLite, the lemon parser, Fossil and a lot of tcl/tk work.

alecco
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5

Bill Atkinson wrote MacPaint for the original Macintosh.

Kevin Beam
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4

Wayne Ratliff - dBASE. Best example of foundational PC software, written the hard way (in assembler).

dkretz
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4

Probably not on the scale of RMS or Carmack, but Jonathan Blow made Braid single-handedly. Look at how the audio and particle systems reverse in sync with the gameplay; it's a pretty neat effort.

  • I can't imagine Braid without David Hellman's lovely artwork, though. It'd still be tons of fun, but I don't think it would draw you in quite as much as it does now :-). Check out http://www.davidhellman.net/blog/the-art-of-braid-index/, it's a fascinating read. – Gaurav Feb 13 '09 at 18:03
  • Wow, thanks - that was indeed fascinating. If only one could upmod comments! –  Feb 16 '09 at 00:26
4

Rich Hickey - author of Clojure.

Marko
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4

Wayne Venables, allegedly wrote the Fruitshow forum software in 3 hours

4

Arthur Whitney, the developer of the "K" programming language.

Where I heard about him: Superstar programmers

Thought experiment:

The requirement is to build from scratch an SQL engine working on in memory data (take > this as a given. Try to estimate the no. of lines of code (programming language/environment of your choice) this is going to take, and the time it will take you to build it.

Try to estimate the same considering someone you consider good, and someone you consider average.

Scroll down when you've written down your estimates.

Did you ?

Well ?

Using the programming language K, [ http://nsl.com/k/t.k ], a 14 line implementation, took Stevan Apter a couple of hours to write; But that's just the backend. You want an SQL interface? Arthur Whitney just published one in [ http://kx.com/q/e/s.k ], taking all of 20 lines (admittedly, denser than Stevan's); 3 for lexing, ~8 for parsing, the rest for evaluating. I don't know how long it took Arthur, but a day would probably be way too long.

4

The Build Engine History

The Build engine was written by Ken Silverman in 1994 and has gone through several major enhancements from its initial version. Ken wrote a game named "Ken's Labyrinth" in 1992 which he sent demos of to several games companies. One of those companies was Apogee Software. Apogee wasn't interested in the game but they were interested in the engine. He later started writing a demo named "Build" in 1993 which he also sent out to several companies. Apogee offered him a contract to write the Build engine for them.

Ken has a page on his website which features a timeline outlining the development and events surrounding the Build engine. Ken also has available for download old demos of the engine at various points in it's development and now the full source code!

4

Dave Cutler

The father of VMS and NT.

Personal note - I consider it a bit of a shame that the world at large doesn't get to see Cutler's code in NT (most of it still lives on today in Windows). It is by far the most gorgeous code I've seen, in any language. I used to look it up when I felt I needed 'code inspiration'. Getting to meet him and work with him in Windows Azure will definitely count as one of the highlights of my Microsoft career.

3

Paul Lutus (Apple Writer, among others)

Brent.Longborough
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dark_alex - though branded as hacker, its still falls under this one-man-army category

3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slava_Pestov

Slava Pestov. Factor creator (Factor is one of the most advanced programming languages out there).

Created Jedit (at 15 years old?)

berlinbrown2
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DJ Delorie for DJGPP? Although I'm not sure if that was a one man job. As Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen pointed out in the comments to this answer, although the port is very impressive, it is a port of GCC, which is a major example of multi-person group effort.

Gaurav
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    djgpp is a port of gcc which is a team effort. Still just the port is impressive. –  Oct 12 '11 at 06:16
3

Rod Johnson, creator of Spring framework

3

Peldi Guilizzoni, the creator of Balsamiq--an Adobe AIR application for creating mockups. The blog post with statistical numbers about first (not full) year of company operation provides a lot of information to think about.

3

John Carmack - No need for introduction ;)

Dave Cutler - Only guy on the planet to have worked on 3 major OS kernels. Not sure if he is a one-man-army kinda guy, but certainly did a lot on his own.

Michael Abrash - Optimization god! If he can't optimize it, it probably can't be done at all!

Tim Sweeney - Unreal Engine (Currently working alone on the 4th generation of Unreal Technology)

Steve Wozniak - Apple's one-many-army

3

Jordan Mechner

He programmed first Prince of Persia games. All animations on those games were based on his brother's moves. I guess he isn't programming anymore.

Ufuk Hacıoğulları
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Ivan Sutherland, inventor of Sketchpad.

I once asked Ivan Sutherland "How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object-oriented software system all in one year?" He said "Well, I didn't know it was hard".

- Alan Kay

3

Dan Bricklin inventor of the "electronic spreadsheet" i.e. VisiCalc which "inspired" Microsoft among others to "invent" similar software i.e. Excel.

Richard Bartle for inventing MUD which is the great grandfather of all MMORPGs.

CBM80
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Jon Tackabury - Binary Fortress

2

Most of the notable hackers of the world for good or ill:

Eric Corley, Kevin Mitnick, Solar Designer, Lamo? Poulson?

2

Didier Dambrin: Original creator of FruityLoops. Written in Delphi.

2

Nasir Gebelli wrote some of the early great Apple II games: Gorgon, Space Eggs, Firebird and Zenith (and many others.)

2

Kernighan, Ritchie, James Clark, Audrey Tang. Bob Scheifler and Jim Gettys (X11). Jon Bentley. John Ousterhout (tcl/tk).

2

Matt Mullenweg?

Created WordPress, BBPress (wrote in a few days), etc.

Pretty influential in web development with regard to weblogs. Doing well for a 25 y/o.

ricbax
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    From a technical view wordpress is not really impressive.. but it works great none the less :P –  Feb 18 '10 at 04:12
2

Nick Bradbury the creator of HomeSite, TopStyle and FeedDemon.

Community
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Jeff Minter. He's been programming video games and music light synthesizers since the early 1980's. While he does work with another programmer now, he was a one-man-show for many years. His most impressive feat IMHO? Writing Tempest 3000 for the defunct Nuon, in assembler.

If you own an Xbox 360, you have some of his code.

Dave
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I've always been impressed by Scawen Roberts, who has been single-handedly programming the game Live for Speed for the last five or so years.

Fara
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Donald Knuth, Ken Thompson, RMS, linus torvalds, Fabrice Bellard, ZeroCool :)

ZeroCool
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Paul Lutus the father of Apple Writter for the Apple II

1

Peter Blum, creator of a nice collection of very useful custom ASP.NET controls. On top of everything else he does, his documentation is some of the most detailed I've ever seen even outdoing Microsoft's in granularity. And yet he still does it all himself.

Steve Wortham
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  • Mike Pall: singlehandedly wrote LuaJIT, which is arguably the fastest dynamic language VM ever created.
  • Fabrice Bellard: created ffmpeg, qemu, TCC, and on the side also discovered the fastest known algorithm for calculating the nth digit of pi.
  • Julian Seward: created bzip2 and Valgrind.
1

Some personal favorites

Avery Lee of Virtualdub - Not really widespread use but the amount of code is impressive, not to mention he seems to have an obsession in assembly optimizing everything.

Gabest of Media Player Classic - As far as lines of code and impact, I think he deserves some appreciation for its early development.

1

Austin Meyer, creator of X-Plane.

See this story.

Greg Sadetsky
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Justin Frankel - creator of Winamp and Gnutella, the first serverless P2P system, still in use

Thelema
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Markus Persson("Notch") is the one guy behind the game design, programming and graphics of Minecraft.

1

Eddir Kohler, author of the Click modular router

1

Some not yet mentioned

  • L. Peter Deutsch - Ghostscript, PDP 1 version of Lisp (at 12)
  • Notch creator of MineCraft
nkassis
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Charles Simonyi (Microsoft Word and Excel)

Simon Peyton-Jones (Haskell)

Joe Armstrong (Erlang)

Bertrand Meyer (Eiffel)

1

Daisuke Amaya aka Pixel

He created Cave Story.

1

Allan Odgaard, author of TextMate.

1

How about Jeff Atwood? He created this website you're using right now.

z-boss
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Kredns
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Andrew Tridgell.

rsync & samba

0

Carl Friedrich Gauss - the man behind most of humanities understanding probably fits this description.

ldog
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Brian O'Kelley - king of Ad tech

0

I would posit that most really cool software came from one person. We could just as well ask "Does anyone know of any brilliantly designed software out there that is the result of a committee rather than a single individual?"

0

Paul Lutus developed Apple Writer alone in a remote cabin in Oregon. He still puts out some excellent ruby and python scripts.

0

James Clark wrote groff, sgmls, expat, and was a key contributor in creating XML and Relax NG.

0

Gabriel Weinberg, creator of DuckDuckGo.

sdtom
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Lennart Poettering - Author of Avahi, pulseaudio , systemd

zer0c00l
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  • He is also know for his famous alternative patch to linux kernel for the performance optimization http://www.webupd8.org/2010/11/alternative-to-200-lines-kernel-patch.html – zer0c00l Feb 13 '11 at 08:49
0

Chris Crawford (of Atari, at the time) author of numerous ground-breaking games, including Eastern Front (1941) and Balance of Power.

-3

Chuck Norris. What? You didn't know he could program too? =)