Programming heroes

Who are your heroes of programming?

For me, it's humble people who generously contribute without expecting any recognition or reward.

Fabrice Bellard comes to mind: FFMPEG, QEMU etc.

rich hickey

this nigga had 0 exposure to programming until he was old enough to run his own recording studio and now he's designed a new programming language that is very useful and practical but also ambitious and innovative. it's inspiring because there's all these people who started learning when they were like 6 years old or have double phds from mit and it feels like you can never catch up to them.


(if you havent looked at clojure you should. it solves the biggest problem with lisp which was that it was a niche language only for people willing to invest a lot of time in it because you had to learn a lot of meta programming shit so you could grow the language by yourself. clojure comes with sugar for powerful datastructures and all of the jvm + libraries so you can get shit done even if you dont know very much. also the community is pretty much exploding. i think it has promise.)