How has nobody said Fabrice Bellard?
QEMU, FFMPEG, TCC, TinyGL, QuickJS, and TSAC.
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
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This is an easy one. Chris Sawyer. Created multiple Tycoon games from scratch, in Assembly.
If it isn't Linus Torvalds with Linux then it has to be Steve Wozniak and Apple.
I have to agree with Linus for the Linux kernel and for git. Not just because he's well known, but there are few developers who have had the influence he has and continues to have on a daily basis over the course of the last few decades. I really worry what will happen when he finally decides to step down. He gets a lot of flak for his rants against other developers, but for good reason: he demands a certain level of coding quality because it effects billions of servers and workstations, but with no room for being tactful or gentle. Some devs get lazy and are inefficient, and that would effect stability for everyone. Also: I would hate to submit a module to Linus because I'm also lazy and inefficient in my coding.
Ken Thompson.
He built grep in a cave overnight with a box of scraps.
Somebody tell me if my vibe is correct: Linus Torvalds
Everyone remembers him for the kernel, many forget he also wrote git.
Tarn Adams and Concerned Ape.
Why? Dwarf Fortress and Stardew Valley (and maybe Haunted Chocolatier if he ever works on it instead of adding another big update to Stardew). 'Nuff said.
I say Don Knuth, who created TeX.
It is in use already much longer than Linux, and for several decades it was regarded as the only bug-free program.
Check out the absolute chads who created typst.app while writing their thesis because they were frustrated with LaTeX
As a TeX hobbyist, I would argue that they serve slightly different purposes. Plain TeX is for typography, the workflow is that of low level control where your human judgement is needed for interventions and decisions. LaTeX serves a different purpose, it aides the author of a text to focus on the content while abstracting away the underlying inherent problems in fitting letters on a page. TeX is small, difficult, but simple. LaTeX is huge, with 30 years of abstractions built on top of abstractions, until nowadays few people know how to actually deal with an overfull or underfull hbox the right way.
Yes, LaTeX is huge with its many years of development and layers upon layers of abstractions glued on top of one another. This is also why a new start was necessary, this is where Typst comes in, in my opinion.
I haven't tried typst, how does it compare to plain TeX?
Well, Typst isn't directly comparable to plain TeX given how low level plain TeX is. Typst also poses itself as a LaTeX alternative, rather than that of plain TeX. So, I think, it'd be more prudent to compare between Typst and LaTeX.
For beginners, Typst is much easier to get into compared to LaTeX. Typst is also much faster at compiling documents. Error messages are also clearer in Typst. Typst itself is compiled to a single binary, so local installation is as easy as just downloading it and putting it into a directory that's available in $PATH.
I might as well also mention that the Typst web app runs on webassembly (meaning that the browser does the compiling instead of some server), so there is no compile duration limit like that of Overleaf.
Yeah that thing looks really dope. Wish I had that when I was at University.
TempleOS is really impressive for an OS made by one guy! Terrence Davis had some mental health issues, but he's legendary as a programmer.
Terry A. Davis's story inspired me to try coding professionally.
Unfortunately coding professionally convinced me I'd have more fun in IT.
I don't know many, so I'll throw in Concerned Ape.
Love stardew, sunk over 2k hours into it and counting, and CA is based for a lot of reasons (not just his solo coding), but he's not The Guy™ this question is looking for.
John Carmack comes to mind
John Carmack is not human. He is a cyborg from the future.
Sid Meier only one who's name is before game title.
Has he ever done a solo project though? Even the first game titled with his name, Pirates!, wasn't solo. It was his project though.
And I can think of other games with people's names before the game title, but they were the author of the source material and not involved with the game development itself: Tom Clancy and Clive Barker.
You need to go deeper, how they founded MicroProse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellcat_Ace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd_of_the_Jungle
Jeff Minter. If you know, you know.
I mean ernest famously did not seem to let people in with kbin. Its the whole reason mbin had to be forked. He was nice though so not sure about chad per se. Hope he is doing well.
I mean, if you're not looking at just coding, Tyler bringing us Schedule 1 was pretty bad ass in many ways.
ankane for Ruby/rails. person is just constantly working on useful stuff
Victor Chelaru of FlatRedBall and GUM fame. He codes in his car while waiting for his kids to get out of school, he codes on the beach while on vacation, and he literally codes in the waiting room of doctors visits. No joke, he almost never stops coding.
Richard Harris has had many awesome projects. He generally gets community support quickly. I started using Svelte way back on Svelte 1, and it was amazing. Still using it, and I love how Richard and the others have improved it.