166
votes

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?

8
  • 12
    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 9, 2009 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 9, 2009 at 20:41
  • Wow it will be interesting who of this guys will get more votes, its quite an impressive list
    – DFectuoso
    Feb 9, 2009 at 21:00
  • 5
    Most of the answers are wrong. Anders didn't build C# or Turbo Pascal all by himself, for example.
    – Robert S.
    Feb 10, 2009 at 2:01
  • 11
    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, 2009 at 17:21

111 Answers 111

273
votes

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.

12
  • 4
    Just don't ask about Daikatana :)
    – tsilb
    Feb 9, 2009 at 23:12
  • 18
    Daikatana was done by Romero after he left iD, don't think there was much Carmack involved ;-)
    – Jasper Bekkers
    Feb 9, 2009 at 23:17
  • 2
    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. Feb 10, 2009 at 0:19
  • 4
    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, 2009 at 5:44
  • 2
    I would agree, think John Carmack will voted for one of the best programmers out there.
    – Berlin Brown
    Feb 10, 2009 at 7:20
230
votes

Donald Knuth

5
  • 2
    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.] Feb 10, 2009 at 4:50
  • 19
    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, 2010 at 4:12
  • 1
    +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.
    – Robert Davis
    Feb 18, 2010 at 4:19
  • 2
    Can't afford not to upvote any question where Don is the answer
    – vrdhn
    Feb 13, 2011 at 11:53
  • 2
    Also: Any guy that pays for his own mistakes (literally! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check ) is awesome in my book. He takes the concept of "one man army" to 11. Oct 5, 2011 at 16:38
163
votes

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

9
  • 8
    He designed their early hardware too. Feb 9, 2009 at 20:55
  • 3
    His book 'iWoz' is an interesting read. He is one of the greatest inventors of his era.
    – Al pacino
    Feb 10, 2009 at 6:38
  • 2
    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.
    – willc2
    Feb 17, 2009 at 7:36
  • 2
    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, 2011 at 23:27
  • 4
    @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). Feb 13, 2011 at 3:22
161
votes

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.

8
  • That's a great book!
    – SquareCog
    Feb 9, 2009 at 22:19
  • 9
    Berlin: like gcc, gdb and make?
    – mjard
    Feb 10, 2009 at 7:26
  • 10
    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.
    – user131
    Mar 4, 2009 at 4:39
  • 1
    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.
    – ashawley
    Mar 24, 2009 at 19:23
  • 11
    xkcd.com/225
    – Jason
    Jun 19, 2009 at 8:33
143
votes

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.

17
  • 14
    Don't forget Transport Tycoon, which probably has a bigger cult following than RCT.
    – Erik Forbes
    Feb 9, 2009 at 20:38
  • 7
    All in assembly too!
    – Malfist
    Feb 9, 2009 at 20:41
  • 1
    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
    – onnodb
    Feb 10, 2009 at 7:13
  • 1
    That OpenTTD exists is a testament to how enjoyable Transport Tycoon was.
    – Rob
    Feb 10, 2009 at 15:34
  • 4
    Had no idea that was built with ASM. Amazing.
    – David McGraw
    Feb 12, 2009 at 6:35
140
votes

Linus Torvalds

12
  • 11
    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 Feb 9, 2009 at 20:40
  • 3
    Exactly. Git is the same way. Linus needs a team :)
    – jrockway
    Feb 9, 2009 at 20:47
  • 9
    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, 2009 at 15:41
  • 21
    Linus's success is based on not being a one-man-army. The GPL was a very important decision of his.
    – ashawley
    Mar 24, 2009 at 19:24
  • 2
    xkcd.com/225
    – Jason
    Jun 19, 2009 at 8:34
98
votes

Bill Joy - wrote vi as well as csh, rlogin, rsh, and rcp

5
  • 76
    Someone buy that man a dictionary!
    – Mike Robinson
    Feb 9, 2009 at 20:54
  • 3
    Some might consider those programs to be a good reason to use the word infamous instead. Or at least vi and csh. ;) Feb 9, 2009 at 23:33
  • Wasn't Java developed by James Gosling? Feb 20, 2009 at 15:13
  • 3
    Not to mention the TCP/IP stack for BSD: archive.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/…
    – Yawar
    Oct 1, 2009 at 1:46
  • @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). Feb 13, 2011 at 3:25
97
votes

Just for completeness (not really competitive with today's programming "heros", but truly a "one-man-army" in her times ;-): Ada Lovelace

2
  • 5
    Drats, you posted before I got mine on. delete mine, +1 to you.
    – WolfmanDragon
    Feb 9, 2009 at 21:07
  • 12
    A one-woman-army programmer really :)
    – Paggas
    Oct 11, 2009 at 21:02
93
votes

John Resig, creator of the jQuery javascript framework.

2
  • 5
    you had me at 'jQuery'
    – BPAndrew
    Feb 11, 2009 at 18:04
  • 28
    + yeah, jQuery is rocks, I lost 10 pounds in just a week using jQuery wight loss plugin.
    – clyfe
    Feb 13, 2011 at 0:08
92
votes

Guido van Rossum (author of Python)

2
  • 9
    How can Guido be considered a one-man-army? In my view he is a great collaborator.
    – asksol
    Feb 13, 2011 at 0:00
  • 3
    For the most part Guido was alone on Python for 10 years, codeswarm show when it picks up: vimeo.com/1093745 Feb 13, 2011 at 11:55
88
votes

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

3
  • He also wrote patch and rn, iirc
    – Dana
    Feb 9, 2009 at 23:19
  • I couldn't compile wall.c properly. Work for anybody else:
    – Adam Nelson
    Feb 12, 2011 at 22:45
  • 1
    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.
    – asksol
    Feb 12, 2011 at 23:54
82
votes

Anders Hejlsberg creator of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# (and partly .NET), ....

75
votes

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

7
  • OOO, these are all good.
    – Berlin Brown
    Feb 10, 2009 at 7:18
  • 3
    you can use it for anything that needs to be transported to people.
    – Svish
    Feb 10, 2009 at 8:34
  • 4
    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 $$$. Feb 10, 2009 at 11:49
  • 25
    @svish - I'd like a chocolate bar please, can you seed?
    – AShelly
    Feb 10, 2009 at 20:10
  • 1
    Facebook uses BitTorrent to push their 1GB+ compiled binaries to their servers.
    – Paperjam
    Oct 11, 2011 at 22:12
72
votes

Bjarne Stroustrup for the invention and 1st implementation of C++

1
  • 3
    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. Feb 13, 2011 at 3:27
68
votes

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.

60
votes

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.

3
  • Oren must write code in his sleep, his output is simply tremendous. +1 Feb 9, 2009 at 20:40
  • Not only that, but he also posts a whole lot of info on his blog. I suspect he is actually 3 or 4 people :-P Seriously, he is working on a commercial product, a bunch of open source tools, a blog with multiple updates a day. All of this concurrently. Feb 9, 2009 at 21:17
  • He is a MACHINE. Feb 13, 2009 at 19:58
60
votes

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.

3
  • 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, 2009 at 18:07
  • 2
    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, 2011 at 1:11
  • Check out some of his lecture notes (on his site). I so want to take is class.
    – awm
    Feb 13, 2011 at 1:51
59
votes

Jon Skeet

9
  • 37
    When does Jon Skeet have time for programming?
    – jrockway
    Feb 9, 2009 at 20:48
  • 31
    He has an NMI fire every 8ns during which he stops answering prayers and writes several bug-free programs.
    – Ken
    Feb 9, 2009 at 20:58
  • 3
    @jrockway: Jon uses Butterflies: stackoverflow.com/questions/305223/jon-skeet-facts/…
    – OscarRyz
    Feb 21, 2009 at 1:45
  • 9
    He's a book writer, forum commenter, not a one-man-arm programmer..
    – Ciwee
    Oct 25, 2009 at 11:59
  • 2
    Jon Skeet writes code whilst sleeping.
    – Steven Keith
    Sep 23, 2010 at 15:20
54
votes

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.

3
  • 1
    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. May 21, 2009 at 3:39
  • I just love the "Make a X-Window configuration that is a DVB-T transmitter" project - bellard.org/dvbt. Just getting the idea!
    – user1249
    Feb 20, 2011 at 9:23
  • 5
    After seeing his Linux that runs inside the browser, I had to give this a +1. bellard.org/jslinux May 18, 2011 at 2:32
50
votes

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

5
  • Wow. I'm never bitching about an ergonomic keyboard again.
    – Mike Robinson
    Feb 9, 2009 at 21:06
  • YOU FORGOT LUCID EMACS! Feb 9, 2009 at 23:34
  • That is brilliant.
    – Ali A
    Feb 9, 2009 at 23:58
  • 1
    The netscape launch was hardly computer science.
    – user1249
    Feb 13, 2011 at 8:00
  • Don't forget GLMatrix! I still love that thing.
    – Pascal
    Feb 14, 2011 at 15:40
50
votes

_why's self-portrait

_why has contributed some cool stuff to the Ruby community :

... and many more :)

7
  • 5
    I'd say you're pushing the term "famous" a little too far with this one :) Compared to the others in the bunch here.
    – ldigas
    Feb 10, 2009 at 2:51
  • 2
    I don't think the Ruby people would agree :)
    – Geo
    Feb 10, 2009 at 15:56
  • 1
    Out of everyone posted so far, he is the only one man army on the list.
    – stonemetal
    Feb 12, 2011 at 22:39
  • While he was active, yeah, crazy amounts of output.
    – tadman
    Feb 12, 2011 at 22:50
  • Dude was incredible. While he was cranking out great code, he was also cranking out great poetry, songs, and comics. Feb 13, 2011 at 7:42
48
votes

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.

1
  • 1
    His wrists? I would've moved to a more finger-based technique, then. Jun 29, 2009 at 18:04
31
votes

Steve Gibson

31
votes

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

8
  • I don't know about the others, but I'm pretty sure he didn't have much to do with Civ2. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_II
    – Gaurav
    Feb 13, 2009 at 18:11
  • 5
    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.
    – drhorrible
    Jul 22, 2009 at 14:15
  • 12
    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...
    – BobMcGee
    Jan 12, 2010 at 1:55
  • 1
    @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, 2010 at 6:26
  • 1
    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. Mar 25, 2010 at 12:58
29
votes

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.

1
  • I said 'Slava' because of Factor.
    – Berlin Brown
    Feb 10, 2009 at 7:19
27
votes

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

2
  • 3
    We'd be using SEA's ARC :-) But yes, PKZIP was quite important when Modems were still slower than postal mail. Feb 10, 2009 at 11:52
  • Some data transfers are still faster with postal services. Mar 18, 2011 at 12:48
22
votes

John Backus - Fortran

Stephen Wolfram - Mathematica package

Sid Meier - Civilization

Tim Berners-Lee - inventor of World Wide Web

Phil Zimmermann - PGP

3
  • Wow Civilization is a great game, cant imagine doing all that with just 1 guy... amazing
    – DFectuoso
    Feb 9, 2009 at 22:34
  • I never followed the sequels, but the first one was always credited to him.
    – ldigas
    Feb 9, 2009 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 ...
    – ldigas
    Oct 17, 2009 at 16:34
22
votes

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.

8
  • 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. Feb 9, 2009 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." Feb 9, 2009 at 21:10
  • It's actually only the theme of that one essay.
    – Fabian Steeg
    Feb 9, 2009 at 23:36
  • But it's the one everyone remembers!
    – catfood
    Feb 10, 2009 at 5:09
  • 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. Feb 10, 2009 at 13:08
22
votes

Gus Mueller.

20
votes

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

1
  • +1 - Almost forgot about Khaled and his dedication to IRC. Dec 9, 2009 at 7:00

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