Why do people who mention Linus Torvalds, Theo de Raadt, Rich Hickey, Fabrice Bellard, Simon Peyton Jones, Satoshi Nakamoto (ok, that may be several people) etc. get downvoted to oblivion?
This seems especially weird seen most people here are using Git and many of the things we have wouldn't exist without these people.
If I'm not mistaken Rich Hickey took one or two years off, pulled the plug and went on to create Clojure.
Saying "But that's only one in ten million" ain't an argument: there are genius programmers out there and we're all using daily piece of code from these genius programmers.
Watching videos from Linus Torvalds (the talk about Git he gave at Google is amazing), Theo de Raadt (anything about security), Rich Hickey, Simon Peyton Jones, etc. is one of the thing I prefer to do.
I've also personally met several genius programmers: including one who had been working on at Adobe and who (while not at Adobe anymore) then single-handedly wrote a Java bytecode to Objective-C source code converter. I know for a fact that this converter allowed to write an app which reached top 3 in the appstore.
I've also competed ten years ago or so versus plain geniuses in the TopCoder algorithmic competition. Some of the best ranked coder there had incredible achievements, like for one of them having won the mathematics olympiad several times.
That's the thing: even "one in ten million" means that there are quite a few genius programmers out there among us. And we owe a lot to them: not only have we many great tools and projects which would never have existed without them, but they also let us get a glimpse inside their beautiful minds through the messages / blog they post and through the video they make.
The down vote comes from the idea that this is not the only way to create good, useful, widely used and appreciated code.
Of course there are geniuses that have enough raw talent, dedication and focus to do amazing things with ease. But there are plenty of others that while not considered a 'genius', will have to use pure grit to accomplish feats of greatness.
This seems especially weird seen most people here are using Git and many of the things we have wouldn't exist without these people.
If I'm not mistaken Rich Hickey took one or two years off, pulled the plug and went on to create Clojure.
Saying "But that's only one in ten million" ain't an argument: there are genius programmers out there and we're all using daily piece of code from these genius programmers.
Watching videos from Linus Torvalds (the talk about Git he gave at Google is amazing), Theo de Raadt (anything about security), Rich Hickey, Simon Peyton Jones, etc. is one of the thing I prefer to do.
I've also personally met several genius programmers: including one who had been working on at Adobe and who (while not at Adobe anymore) then single-handedly wrote a Java bytecode to Objective-C source code converter. I know for a fact that this converter allowed to write an app which reached top 3 in the appstore.
I've also competed ten years ago or so versus plain geniuses in the TopCoder algorithmic competition. Some of the best ranked coder there had incredible achievements, like for one of them having won the mathematics olympiad several times.
That's the thing: even "one in ten million" means that there are quite a few genius programmers out there among us. And we owe a lot to them: not only have we many great tools and projects which would never have existed without them, but they also let us get a glimpse inside their beautiful minds through the messages / blog they post and through the video they make.
Why downvote?