Knuth was in a fraternity, meaning living with a dozen people and going to parties, so I don't think asocial = great programmer. I also agree with the other posts that in the end it's really just design skills that makes a great programmer. Designing these highly complex systems to somehow all fit seamlessly together, be self documenting, be maintainable, easy to reason about for future optimization and easy to add features to. The more professional programming I do the more I realize how bad I am at it when I come across a designer who is able to implement the above and make it look easy.