Where would you rank Linus Torvalds?
On this particular case, Linus has publicly admitted that he struggles with empathy.
By what metric?
Popularity? PR? Net worth? Complex software? Competitive programming? Impact?
For every "top" SE there are tens of similarly skilled engineers that you have never heard of
His record speaks for itself. I know it is tough to imagine what it was like programming 3D engines meant to run on graphics non-accelerated PCs running DOS, without the internet knowledge or collaboration available to us now, but the stuff he was doing was absolutely revolutionary. He basically created PC gaming as we know it today by creating a market for 3D accelerators and before that by doing it in software very well. He also did this stuff in an record amount of time. From Wolfenstein 3D (1992) to Quake (1995) he made three separate engines which each revolutionized the industry one after the other.
EDIT: The metric I am using is 'impact' in an industry and in society in general -- the impact of Doom and Quake on culture and the adoption of computers and PC gaming and many other things can not be overstated. You can draw a direct line from Doom to Quake to nVidia to CUDA and machine learning if you want.
[1] https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2021/Karis_Nanite_SI...
Similarly there's the work nvidia is doing, using AI technology to upscale graphics instead of rendering things at 4K.
Hobbyists make complicated things quite regularly, although I don't know about 10x quake.
10x a quake for modern hardware, maybe (could be quite simple)
10x software rendered dos quake with loads of asm, probably not.
It adds frames since I think 3.0.
Update: https://youtu.be/6O2B9BZiZjQ looks good around 3:54
[1]: https://valvedev.info/archives/abrash/
All of Carmack's engines were YEARS ahead of their time. Everyone was doing baked lighting and employing various gimmicks for dynamic-looking shadows, and this dude (and his team) comes in and destroys everyone with this fully-, actually-dynamic lighting system. I don't think anyone else even came close until Crysis in 2007.
If that isn't a top 10 programmer performance than I don't know what is.
2001 macworld demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80guchXqz14
Nobody's saying he isn't brilliant. But it's not possible to declare him as a "top 10" programmer without actually taking into account all the other programmers.
I think there are at least 10 other programmers that you've never heard of, but that have had as much or more impact on society in general as Carmack did.
Isn't it enough to just say he's brilliant? Ranking programmers is a fool's errand and serves no purpose other than to devalue other brilliant programmers.
(Also, I think measuring how brilliant someone is by how much impact they've had on society doesn't make much sense. Those are two entirely different things.)
I guess? I don't know. There are so many programmers that have had a much greater overall impact and such than Carmack has (which in no way takes away from Carmack's accomplishments!) that I find it hard to say either way.
That's part of why I think trying to rank people is a bit strange. I doubt that there is even much consensus on what it takes to be a "programming god" in the first place.
But I do agree that Carmack is great!
If you correlate against lines of code written over a lifetime then John Brunner and Vernor Vinge bubble to the top. They're my go-to examples for people who think that literature reviews "don't matter".
Kind of a fun exercise since we get to see all the different values out there in the world.
He's very good. Enough people agree. I recommend letting it at that.
I guess a better way of putting it would’ve been the SystemShock would have run a lot faster if it had BSP.
I spend so much time trying to do a good job which I can be proud of and yet I always know there are bugs and I just hope not too many players notice and get annoyed by them.
And here we are, pointing out poorly written code in practically ancient software and attributing it to one particular programmer. Of course, Carmack has more than shown his worth throughout his career. But I dread the thought of a forum post pointing out mistakes I've made at work like this.
It's part of why it took me so long to dare publish articles about fun stuff I've done at work.
I’m not an elegant coder. My code isn’t perfect. It does run however and is pretty efficient mostly bug free. It does it’s useful thing and I can be proud of that.
Having gone through enough code reviews to know there is a huge amount of polish one can give code. It’s a trade off between perfect and Good enough.
I’m hopeful new languages and patterns leveraging libraries help make our code better or at least let us write more if it.
-- "We Make Shitty Software... With Bugs!"
http://scripting.com/davenet/1995/09/03/wemakeshittysoftware...
I think it is a good mindset to have. We must all assume that software is an imperfect thing done by imperfect beings. Even celebrate it.
On this particular case, I recommend concentrating not on the fact that there was a bug, but on the fact that the code written so many years ago is still relevant for someone today. Focus on that. Try to make something that someone will find a bug in 30 years from now.
Snippet:
I want bug free software. I also want software that runs at infinite speed, takes no bandwidth, is flexible enough to do anything, and was finished yesterday.
Every day I make decisions to let something stand and move on, rather than continuing until it is "perfect". Often, I really WANT to keep working on it, but other things have risen to the top of the priority que, and demand my attention.
* https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-ar...
That's why pieces I publish about my work usually contain a fairly long section about potential further improvements.
https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/mast...
It's a _fascinating_ snapshot into Quake's development.
I have no idea if his .plan is a record of what he, specifically, was doing, or if he was just capturing what the programming team was doing, but at the very least, it makes clear that he was aware of huge amounts of very highly specific game code issues as they were being worked on and was almost certainly deeply involved.
Hmm... 11 would put me at 19999, so I must've been more like 12 or 13. I remember that's when I started taking gamedev seriously.
Carmack is great but you can't really say he's better than say some guy you've never heard of who wrote a bunch of absolutely brilliant algorithms inside a missile defense system and it's all super secret. Or someone who did amazing work on a compiler Carmack used or brilliant work in an OS kernel that you're never going to know about, or some AI code, or something deep within a stock exchange's platform.
Carmack's perceived greatness is elevated because almost 100% of what he has worked on is directly visible to the average consumer.
If a musician had a noticeable impact on culture and was prolific, I don't see why we can't put them in a bracket of [in top #]. The ranking is really just to illustrate my respect for his work, accomplishments, insightful communications, and continued relevance as well as impact on my life and those around me. You can call that 'dumb' if you like, but I am human just like you and am not above placing some people's accomplishments above those of others.
Most programmers are quickly forgotten if they were ever known in the first place. In terms of cultural impact, think of the programmers behind our PC or mobile operating systems, major consumer app categories like spreadsheets, word processors, photo or video editing, etc. Of course some nerds of computing history can cite folks behind all these, but it is niche trivia to most of the population.
It also seems like an era coming to a close where a solo programmer can deliver an impactful product. Who gets the credit instead? Usually an executive or entrepreneur gets the credit. Sometimes this person programmed early on, but often they either transitioned to management or started there and other programmers were responsible for delivering the product we eventually know.
This is true but you have to look at it differently. There are generally two ways of looking at history: the 'great man'[0] theory, or the 'of the times' theory.
If you look at it one way Woz and Carmack and Torvalds and the others were instrumental in shaping their surroundings and without those specific people we would have lost out on basically the entire technological world as we know it.
If you look at it another way, they were inevitable -- the times were such that it was bound to happen (or at least extremely likely) because of a great confluence of events that could never be arranged or predicted, and if Woz had electrocuted himself making the Apple I power supply module then someone else would have done something similar around the same time and we end up at the same spot (but Steve Jobs becomes a moderately successful Bay Area Benz dealer and we all use Blackberry phones with physical keyboards in 2023).
The era of an individual engineer or programmer making a paradigm shifting breakthrough in his or her basement may be over, but that just means the times have shifted into another dynamic. What that is can not be predicted, but if we do survive the oncoming crises upon us and somehow also never end up turning the planet into smoldering radioactive ash over a shipping lane dispute or something, there will be a time when such a person can be expected to emerge and do it again.
[0] excuse the masculine nature of this terminology, but unfortunately that is what it is called, though I haven't formally studied history in a while and it could have changed
But also as much fun for people with appropriately specialized interests, so it'll probably keep happening.
1) Perseverance and focus: He kept rewriting the quake renderer, pushing it faster and better, where other people had long ago settled for a lesser variant or given up.
2) Try everything, even the stupid ideas. When he wrote quake, the wisdom was that the FPU was way to slow for a game. He managed to do z-divisions for blocks of 16 pixels on it, while the integer code spit out the pixels.
3) Attention to detail. The doom span renderer was sub pixel precise, which was pretty unique for its time. It looked better in a hard to define way.
4) Code quality. Doom and quake are very readable, very portable and heavily documented. The average 1-person codebase tends to be messy and undocumented, as nobody else ever takes a look. On the other hand, plenty of fixmes in there. It was unabashedly special cased where he could get away with it.
5) He consumed whatever idea he could get. BSPs were an obscure research trick before he took them and ran with it.
He had huge holes in his 3D knowledge when writing doom, as he admits himself. He didn't care until quake forced him to level up. But he could look in the mirror, say he needed to do better, and learn the extra things when he had to.
I don't know if Carmack is that much smarter than the average HNer, but he surely works a lot harder. And that's an even better compliment, in my book
I'm pretty sure I've read it in "Masters of Doom".
* https://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/index.php
I recommend checking it out.
EDIT: i was thinking of the analysis done on Quake 2, which is more about the engine:
* https://fabiensanglard.net/quake2/index.php
while the one about is regarding the multiplayer system, which is still an amazing bit of dev.
Github:
* https://github.com/id-Software/Quake