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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
    Commented 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
    Commented 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
    Commented 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.
    Commented 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
    Commented Feb 10, 2009 at 17:21

111 Answers 111

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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.
    – Nosredna
    Commented Feb 10, 2009 at 3:00
  • GAH! I can't even IMAGINE!
    – John Rudy
    Commented Feb 10, 2009 at 19:46
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Bram Moolenaar -- wrote almost all of VIM by himself :]

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    Curse the day! I am still avoiding vim, but it's always waiting in ambush.
    – Dan Rosenstark
    Commented Jun 29, 2009 at 18:06
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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
    Commented Apr 10, 2009 at 19:37
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    +1 - the original implementation of 'eval' was done by a grad student.
    – ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells
    Commented Jun 19, 2009 at 8:43
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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.
    – Andrew Gwozdziewycz
    Commented Feb 12, 2011 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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  • Never heard of him......................jk
    – Omar
    Commented Feb 12, 2011 at 23:55
  • not sure if that counts as "programming" but a very bright person nevertheless..
    – Nils
    Commented Feb 13, 2011 at 11:26
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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 .

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  • why is this getting voted down?
    – BPAndrew
    Commented Feb 10, 2009 at 13:21
  • I wonder this too.
    – Anonymous
    Commented Feb 10, 2009 at 18:36
  • I would say this is due to him being more of a standard website developer rather than a technical innovator in the field.
    – Shadi Almosri
    Commented Jun 17, 2009 at 16:49
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Al Gore - He wrote the entire Internet!

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    Aww, c'mon. It was a fluff question. Fluff answers should get some love too.
    – JohnFx
    Commented Mar 4, 2009 at 23:33
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    They're just trying to reward you with a Peer Pressure badge. :)
    – chaos
    Commented Mar 11, 2009 at 3:11
  • 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
    Commented Mar 11, 2009 at 17:48
  • And it was demagnetized by Stephen Hawking (c IT Crowd S3E4 The Speech)!
    – Secko
    Commented Dec 17, 2010 at 0:44
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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!)

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  • The Morpheus diary: zzap64.co.uk/mentalprocre.html
    – tovare
    Commented Feb 9, 2009 at 21:54
  • For those curious on what you can do in 64 Kb, Paradroid is available for the Wii.
    – user1249
    Commented Oct 12, 2011 at 6:14
  • Also check out what can be done in only 1k (yes! 1k) of RAM
    – CraigTP
    Commented Oct 13, 2011 at 8:41
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Richard Greenblatt, wrote much stuff at MIT AI Lab, including chess program, Lisp Machine, etc. etc.

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    Also mentioned in the book hackers, by Steven Levy. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
    – tsilb
    Commented Feb 9, 2009 at 23:14
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Has anyone mentioned Gary Kildall (CP/M) or are you guys too young to remember?

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  • A slow moving army there...
    – user1249
    Commented Feb 13, 2011 at 8:06
  • And Gates is a Billionare today because Kidall turned down IBM. The socialist dream?
    – radarbob
    Commented Feb 14, 2012 at 4:56
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Shawn Fanning, creator of Napster.

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

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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).

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

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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. blog.wilshipley.com
    – Cesar A. Rivas
    Commented Feb 12, 2011 at 23:03
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Markus Persson (aka Notch) for Minecraft.

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

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  • Good at flame wars and fighting vending machines, if that old story is true.
    – Chris Charabaruk
    Commented Feb 9, 2009 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. ;)
    – peacedog
    Commented Feb 10, 2009 at 13:25
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Juan Valdez. Ok, he did't wrote a single line of code. But he helped to code most of apps that we use today.

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  • Not everyone drinks Columbian! ;)
    – BobMcGee
    Commented Jan 12, 2010 at 1:59
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Paul Vixie.

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

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

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

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

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Shaun Inman I guess he was solo

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Pixel - Cave Story

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Doug Cutting

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

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  • That is one of my favorite java projects. Yes, upmodded.
    – Berlin Brown
    Commented Feb 10, 2009 at 17:13
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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)

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

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Bill Atkinson wrote MacPaint for the original Macintosh.

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  • and HyperCard :-)
    – Mitch Haile
    Commented Feb 13, 2011 at 1:41
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