Programming is not a competitive sport. There are many skills involved. No one person has them all. It seems doubtful you can point to any person, or group of people, and say "they are the best."

Programming is a competitive sport see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_programming

Assuming you're talking about programming as a profession, then this would mean that the idea of a 10x or 100x is myth.

Programming inherently has no value. It's the application of programming which is powerful and valuable. I'm assuming by "top", you're talking about the people who are consistently able to create outsized value rather than people who can crank out TopCoder contests.

The application of programming is a multi-disciplinary skill and very very context dependent. The skills needed for a product focused engineer at a 10 person company is far far different than a platform engineer at say - AWS.

Also, programming is so vast a field now that your question is simply too broad and has no concrete answer. Perhaps a better question is something specific like "Who are the top iOS UI engineers in the world?". We're far past the point in our field where there is a "top" person who is good at the entire field broadly.

programming is now so vast field that you really cant mention some XYZ that he/she is a excellent programmer.from embedded systems to total client-side languages,there is an ocean of programming languages today

Is there a programmer who has had more impact over a career than Linus Torvalds?

Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing arguably?

Could you please define "Top Programmer(s)" ?

MJ