{"id":6839,"date":"2015-09-15T09:10:29","date_gmt":"2015-09-15T13:10:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6839"},"modified":"2015-09-15T20:37:26","modified_gmt":"2015-09-16T00:37:26","slug":"who-are-the-famous-programmers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6839","title":{"rendered":"Who are the famous programmers?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Who are the programmers who are famous for doing programmer things?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m wondering about this because my wife Cathy asked me a simple question last night, and I realized I didn&#8217;t have an answer to it.  &#8220;Are you&#8221; she asked &#8220;the most famous programmer in the world?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>This was a question which I had, believe it or not, never thought about before. But it&#8217;s a reasonable one to ask, given recent evidence &#8211; notably, the unexpected success of my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/esr\">Patreon page<\/a>.  This is relevant because Patreon is mainly an arts-funding site &#8211; it&#8217;s clearly not designed for or by techies.<\/p>\n<p>There are a couple of obvious ways to get this question wrong. One is to point at, the likes of, say Donald Knuth &#8211; towering reputation among programmers, but no visibility outside CS and math academia.<\/p>\n<p>Another is to point at programmers who are famous, but not for being programmers.  Bill Gates, for example, is famous for running Microsoft, not for code he&#8217;s written, or (at an acceptable one metalevel) anything he&#8217;s written about code.<\/p>\n<p>A third error would be to point at people like Kevin Mitnick or Aaron Swartz, or anyone else who&#8217;s famous because of their role in a high-profile cracking incident.<\/p>\n<p>My immediate reaction was to try to think of other programmers who are both famous for doing programmer things and have name recognition outside the population of programmers itself.  So&#8230;the first person I thought of was actually John Carmack.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;What&#8221;?  I hear you say.  &#8220;What about Richard Stallman?  Or Linus Torvalds?&#8221;  Good question. But I think the insider perspective of hackers and programmers is unhelpful here. Yes, these guys are heroes to <em>us<\/em>&#8230;but Carmack has fame for writing code among people who have never written a line of code in their lives, because of Doom. So do I, for different reasons &#8211; I&#8217;ve even had my photo in <em>People<\/em> magazine with a keyboard in my hand.<\/p>\n<p>Mind you, it&#8217;s not <em>important<\/em> to me whether I&#8217;m the world&#8217;s most famous programmer &#8211; fame is merely an instrument I picked up for tactical reasons and have since discovered is pretty adhesive even when you no longer want it. But my anthropologist head finds the more general question interesting.  Besides, I&#8217;d like to have a better answer to give my wife.<\/p>\n<p>Who are the programmers who are famous <em>as programmers?<\/em> How did they get that way?  Are there any useful generalizations to be made about the group? Discuss in comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Who are the programmers who are famous for doing programmer things? I&#8217;m wondering about this because my wife Cathy asked me a simple question last night, and I realized I didn&#8217;t have an answer to it. &#8220;Are you&#8221; she asked &#8220;the most famous programmer in the world?&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,28,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hacker-culture","category-mr-famous-guy","category-software","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6839"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6842,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6839\/revisions\/6842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}