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Lately I have been learning of more and more programmers who think that if they were working alone, they would be faster and would deliver more quality. Usually that feeling is attached to a feeling that they do the best programming in their team and at the end of the day the idea is quite plausible. If they ARE doing the best programming, and worked alone (and more maybe) the final result would be a better piece of software.

I know this idea would only work if you were passionate enough to work 24/7, on a deadline, with great discipline.

So after considering the idea and trying to learn a little more, I wonder if there are famous one-man-army programmers that have delivered any (useful) software in the past?

DFectuoso
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111 Answers111

273

John Carmack

The guy that wrote the engine for the Doom games, Wolfenstein, the Quake games, etc. Read Masters of Doom, it is a great history of what he and John Romero have done.

Jamie Penney
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230

Donald Knuth

163

Steve Wozniak pretty much was apple's programming staff for the first bit.

Jason Baker
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161

Richard M. Stallman (RMS). While known recently for political rants about closed source software, in his day he was quite the programmer. He single handedly kept up with commercial lisp machine code for quite some time. Emacs and gcc are some of the things he created.

There's a great description of him in the book in Hackers by Steven Levy.

Steve Rowe
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143

Chris Sawyer. He had a little help with music and graphics, but otherwise RollerCoaster Tycoon was all him. Amazing, especially given the physics engine. Last but not least, the entire game was written in assembly language.

140

Linus Torvalds

Andy Mikula
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98

Bill Joy - wrote vi as well as csh, rlogin, rsh, and rcp

Graeme Perrow
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97

Just for completeness (not really competitive with today's programming "heros", but truly a "one-man-army" in her times ;-): Ada Lovelace

93

John Resig, creator of the jQuery javascript framework.

HenningJ
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Sampson
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92

Guido van Rossum (author of Python)

88

Larry Wall - Perl.

And for a fun trip to see what goes in that fabulous mind of his , C programmers can read the winning entry in the international C obfuscation contest in 1986. It's filed under wall.c

82

Anders Hejlsberg creator of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# (and partly .NET), ....

75

Bram Cohen, at least his little project is now causing 50% of all internet traffic[citation needed].

Michael Stum
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72

Bjarne Stroustrup for the invention and 1st implementation of C++

68

Yukihiro Matsumoto did deliver a lot of Ruby all by himself. Ruby's popular now, and lots of people have contributed to it, but he did single-handedly start the ball rolling.

Chris Lutz
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60

Oren Eini aka Ayende Rahien, author of Rhino Mocks and other great open source tools. His is some of the best and most elegant code around.

Igal Tabachnik
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60

DJ Bernstein. qmail, djbdns, and many many others.

Oh, and suing the United States so people here can freely publish cryptography tools on the Internet. Not exactly programming, but totally one-man-army.

59

Jon Skeet

Community
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David Basarab
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54

This is one of those great programmers who doesn't have the "Knuth" fame - Fabrice Bellard. He wrote the original FFmpeg distribution, is the project leader for QEMU, discovered the fastest current pi algorithm, and has not one, but two, wins in the The International Obfuscated C Code Contest. To use a line from one of my favorite CS professors, the man is a rock star.

50

Jamie Zawinski (links to one of the most epic stories in the history of computer science)

Matt Briggs
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50

_why's self-portrait

_why has contributed some cool stuff to the Ruby community :

... and many more :)

Community
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Geo
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48

Read this article for example, starting twowards the middle at about the place where it says,

... the privately held company Celera appeared on the verge of beating the combined scientific teams of the rest of the world to the goal of sequencing the human genome. Celera's approach was less rigorous but faster than the Human Genome Project's approach, and for a very understandable reason: Celera's goal was not to advance science but to win the race by any means fair or foul and thereby claim what would have been the most astonishing conquistadorial prize in human history. For had Celera won the race to sequence the genome, and had it filed patents aggressively, it is conceivable that one tiny company could have laid claim to royalties on virtually all medical progress thenceforward. Nay, they could have claimed proprietary interest in the evolutionary future of the human race.

Never mind that the proposition was more ludicrous, on the face of it, than a private company's laying claim to the moon. The threat was real, and scientists were scared.

This state of affairs was remedied by the heroic efforts of a once obscure University of California at Santa Cruz biology graduate student named Jim Kent, who, over the course of 40 days of coding so furiously that he literally had to soak his wrists in ice baths every night, wrote a program to assemble and make public the Human Genome Project's own map. He completed the task one day ahead of Celera.

Kent's stealth attack thereby beat Celera at its own game virtually single-handedly, in a feat that deserves to become as iconic as Watson and Crick's.

Community
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ChrisW
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31

Steve Gibson

bmb
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31

Sid Meier

Co-founded Microprose and wrote Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, and Sid Meier's Colonization,[2][3], Sid Meier's Civilization IV and a bunch more

asp316
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29

Chuck Moore - Created Forth, ported it to dozens of architectures, designed several microprocessors, made his own CAD system, earned millions on hardware patents, created colorForth... and so on.

kotlinski
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27

Phil Katz absolutely deserves mention. Where would we have been without PKZip.

Jim Blizard
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22

This isn't just a feeling, this is the an article in the 20th anniversary edition of a book by Frederick Brooks called The Mythical Man Month. This is actually, I would guess, a very frequent situation. The personality of a software developer leads itself to being somewhat independent anyways. I don't know of prime examples, but you may be interested in the book I linked above.

22

John Backus - Fortran

Stephen Wolfram - Mathematica package

Sid Meier - Civilization

Tim Berners-Lee - inventor of World Wide Web

Phil Zimmermann - PGP

Rook
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22

Gus Mueller.

Paul D. Waite
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20

Khaled Mardam-Bey, author of mIRC, the famous IRC client.

16

In the gaming world:

  • Jon Van Caneghem - Known for the Might and Magic series, he single-handedly wrote, designed and developed the first entry in the series, with just a little help for artwork.
  • Dan Bunten - Created M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold and a variety of other games, again, back in the early days when game designers were one-man (and, come 1992 for her, one-woman) armies.
  • Bill Budge - Created Pinball Construction Set, alongside many other games. From scratch. Himself. A great Gamasutra piece on PCS's legacy was published recently.

Not to mention all the Atari alumni who went on to Activision. Remember: In the early days, these were all one-man jobs.

John Rudy
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15

Bram Moolenaar -- wrote almost all of VIM by himself :]

14

John McCarthy -- wrote the first version of lisp

Rayne
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12

Nick Bradbury. He wrote HomeSite, TopStyle, and FeedDemon. All three programs top notch. Plus, he pays a lot of attention to his users - that can't be easy for a one-man shop.

Craig O
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12

Joe Hewitt, creator of Firebug and DOM Inspector.

I love Firebug. It made web page debugging way easier.

12

I can't believe I'm the first person to mention this:

Alan Turing

11

Simon Tatham wrote PuTTY. Arguably, one of the most popular [citation needed] windows SSH clients.

Matt Wright wrote a lot of (in)famous Perl scripts that are still in use.

11

Markus Frind CEO of Plentyoffish.com

One man show . Created one of largest dating site by himself using asp.net Gross upwards of 30k day .

11

Al Gore - He wrote the entire Internet!

JohnFx
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10

There are so many great answers here, but I'll add in my own suggestions, and these come from the 1980's heydays of computer games on the Commodore 64:

Andrew Braybrook (Paradroid, Morpheus, Gribbly's Day Out)

Archer MacLean (Jimmy White's Snooker, Dropzone)

Stavros Fasoulas (Sanxion, Delta)

Martin Walker (Citadel)

Jon Hare/Chris Yates (aka Sensible Software) (Wizball, Sensible Soccer)

Ok, that last one is more of a "two-man" army, however, many of these guys worked (mostly) alone, coded mostly in assembler (6510) and also did sound, music and graphics all by themselves.

(Useless trivia - My gravatar is Gribbly Grobbly from Gribbly's day out!)

CraigTP
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10

Richard Greenblatt, wrote much stuff at MIT AI Lab, including chess program, Lisp Machine, etc. etc.

Mike Dunlavey
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10

Has anyone mentioned Gary Kildall (CP/M) or are you guys too young to remember?

psant
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10

Shawn Fanning, creator of Napster.

Lurker Indeed
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9

Charles Babbage - Originator of the concept of a programmable computer.

Dhaust
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9

Walter Bright was once a one-man show for several years when it came to Digital Mars' C++ compiler. He also started the D language and wrote a C++ version of Empire by himself (later ported it to D).

8

Wil Shipley of Delicious Library - http://www.delicious-monster.com/company.php

Benny Wong
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8

Markus Persson (aka Notch) for Minecraft.

Bill the Lizard
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7

Derek Smart of Battlecruiser 3000AD was pretty big in his day. Apparently he was pretty good at flame wars too...

Mike Robinson
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7

Juan Valdez. Ok, he did't wrote a single line of code. But he helped to code most of apps that we use today.

Jonathan
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6

Paul Vixie.

chaos
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6

Matthew Smith, wrote Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy all on his lonesome.

Mark Rendle
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6

My $0.02: Cleve Moler - original author of MATLAB.

gnovice
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6

Steve Streeting whom created Ogre3D, the Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine.

Kieran Senior
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6

Simon Peyton Jones - Functional programming researcher and original author of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler.

Jared Updike
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5

Shaun Inman I guess he was solo

Ayyash
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5

Pixel - Cave Story

kotlinski
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5

Doug Cutting

Started Lucene, started Nutch, created Hadoop after Google publish there paper on Map Reduce...

5

Eugene Roshal for creation of FAR file manager, RAR file format and WinRAR file archiver.

Mark Zuckerberg for creation of Facebook.

z-boss
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5

Al Lowe for Leisure Suit Larry series :) Will Wright for SimCity and finally David Braben for Elite

Perhaps Ron Gilbert should also get a mention for bringing the world Monkey Island (tm)

5

D. Richard Hipp for SQLite, the lemon parser, Fossil and a lot of tcl/tk work.

alecco
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5

Bill Atkinson wrote MacPaint for the original Macintosh.

Kevin Beam
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4

Wayne Ratliff - dBASE. Best example of foundational PC software, written the hard way (in assembler).

dkretz
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4

Probably not on the scale of RMS or Carmack, but Jonathan Blow made Braid single-handedly. Look at how the audio and particle systems reverse in sync with the gameplay; it's a pretty neat effort.

4

Rich Hickey - author of Clojure.

Marko
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4

Wayne Venables, allegedly wrote the Fruitshow forum software in 3 hours

4

Arthur Whitney, the developer of the "K" programming language.

Where I heard about him: Superstar programmers

Thought experiment:

The requirement is to build from scratch an SQL engine working on in memory data (take > this as a given. Try to estimate the no. of lines of code (programming language/environment of your choice) this is going to take, and the time it will take you to build it.

Try to estimate the same considering someone you consider good, and someone you consider average.

Scroll down when you've written down your estimates.

Did you ?

Well ?

Using the programming language K, [ http://nsl.com/k/t.k ], a 14 line implementation, took Stevan Apter a couple of hours to write; But that's just the backend. You want an SQL interface? Arthur Whitney just published one in [ http://kx.com/q/e/s.k ], taking all of 20 lines (admittedly, denser than Stevan's); 3 for lexing, ~8 for parsing, the rest for evaluating. I don't know how long it took Arthur, but a day would probably be way too long.

4

The Build Engine History

The Build engine was written by Ken Silverman in 1994 and has gone through several major enhancements from its initial version. Ken wrote a game named "Ken's Labyrinth" in 1992 which he sent demos of to several games companies. One of those companies was Apogee Software. Apogee wasn't interested in the game but they were interested in the engine. He later started writing a demo named "Build" in 1993 which he also sent out to several companies. Apogee offered him a contract to write the Build engine for them.

Ken has a page on his website which features a timeline outlining the development and events surrounding the Build engine. Ken also has available for download old demos of the engine at various points in it's development and now the full source code!

4

Dave Cutler

The father of VMS and NT.

Personal note - I consider it a bit of a shame that the world at large doesn't get to see Cutler's code in NT (most of it still lives on today in Windows). It is by far the most gorgeous code I've seen, in any language. I used to look it up when I felt I needed 'code inspiration'. Getting to meet him and work with him in Windows Azure will definitely count as one of the highlights of my Microsoft career.

3

Paul Lutus (Apple Writer, among others)

Brent.Longborough
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3

dark_alex - though branded as hacker, its still falls under this one-man-army category

3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slava_Pestov

Slava Pestov. Factor creator (Factor is one of the most advanced programming languages out there).

Created Jedit (at 15 years old?)

berlinbrown2
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3

DJ Delorie for DJGPP? Although I'm not sure if that was a one man job. As Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen pointed out in the comments to this answer, although the port is very impressive, it is a port of GCC, which is a major example of multi-person group effort.

Gaurav
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3

Rod Johnson, creator of Spring framework

3

Peldi Guilizzoni, the creator of Balsamiq--an Adobe AIR application for creating mockups. The blog post with statistical numbers about first (not full) year of company operation provides a lot of information to think about.

3

John Carmack - No need for introduction ;)

Dave Cutler - Only guy on the planet to have worked on 3 major OS kernels. Not sure if he is a one-man-army kinda guy, but certainly did a lot on his own.

Michael Abrash - Optimization god! If he can't optimize it, it probably can't be done at all!

Tim Sweeney - Unreal Engine (Currently working alone on the 4th generation of Unreal Technology)

Steve Wozniak - Apple's one-many-army

3

Jordan Mechner

He programmed first Prince of Persia games. All animations on those games were based on his brother's moves. I guess he isn't programming anymore.

Ufuk Hacıoğulları
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3

Ivan Sutherland, inventor of Sketchpad.

I once asked Ivan Sutherland "How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object-oriented software system all in one year?" He said "Well, I didn't know it was hard".

- Alan Kay

3

Dan Bricklin inventor of the "electronic spreadsheet" i.e. VisiCalc which "inspired" Microsoft among others to "invent" similar software i.e. Excel.

Richard Bartle for inventing MUD which is the great grandfather of all MMORPGs.

CBM80
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2

Jon Tackabury - Binary Fortress

2

Most of the notable hackers of the world for good or ill:

Eric Corley, Kevin Mitnick, Solar Designer, Lamo? Poulson?

2

Didier Dambrin: Original creator of FruityLoops. Written in Delphi.

2

Nasir Gebelli wrote some of the early great Apple II games: Gorgon, Space Eggs, Firebird and Zenith (and many others.)

2

Kernighan, Ritchie, James Clark, Audrey Tang. Bob Scheifler and Jim Gettys (X11). Jon Bentley. John Ousterhout (tcl/tk).

2

Matt Mullenweg?

Created WordPress, BBPress (wrote in a few days), etc.

Pretty influential in web development with regard to weblogs. Doing well for a 25 y/o.

ricbax
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2

Nick Bradbury the creator of HomeSite, TopStyle and FeedDemon.

Community
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2

Jeff Minter. He's been programming video games and music light synthesizers since the early 1980's. While he does work with another programmer now, he was a one-man-show for many years. His most impressive feat IMHO? Writing Tempest 3000 for the defunct Nuon, in assembler.

If you own an Xbox 360, you have some of his code.

Dave
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1

I've always been impressed by Scawen Roberts, who has been single-handedly programming the game Live for Speed for the last five or so years.

Fara
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1

Donald Knuth, Ken Thompson, RMS, linus torvalds, Fabrice Bellard, ZeroCool :)

ZeroCool
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1

Paul Lutus the father of Apple Writter for the Apple II

1

Peter Blum, creator of a nice collection of very useful custom ASP.NET controls. On top of everything else he does, his documentation is some of the most detailed I've ever seen even outdoing Microsoft's in granularity. And yet he still does it all himself.

Steve Wortham
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1
  • Mike Pall: singlehandedly wrote LuaJIT, which is arguably the fastest dynamic language VM ever created.
  • Fabrice Bellard: created ffmpeg, qemu, TCC, and on the side also discovered the fastest known algorithm for calculating the nth digit of pi.
  • Julian Seward: created bzip2 and Valgrind.
1

Some personal favorites

Avery Lee of Virtualdub - Not really widespread use but the amount of code is impressive, not to mention he seems to have an obsession in assembly optimizing everything.

Gabest of Media Player Classic - As far as lines of code and impact, I think he deserves some appreciation for its early development.

1

Austin Meyer, creator of X-Plane.

See this story.

Greg Sadetsky
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1

Justin Frankel - creator of Winamp and Gnutella, the first serverless P2P system, still in use

Thelema
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1

Markus Persson("Notch") is the one guy behind the game design, programming and graphics of Minecraft.

1

Eddir Kohler, author of the Click modular router

1

Some not yet mentioned

  • L. Peter Deutsch - Ghostscript, PDP 1 version of Lisp (at 12)
  • Notch creator of MineCraft
nkassis
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1

Charles Simonyi (Microsoft Word and Excel)

Simon Peyton-Jones (Haskell)

Joe Armstrong (Erlang)

Bertrand Meyer (Eiffel)

1

Daisuke Amaya aka Pixel

He created Cave Story.

1

Allan Odgaard, author of TextMate.

1

How about Jeff Atwood? He created this website you're using right now.

z-boss
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Kredns
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1

Andrew Tridgell.

rsync & samba

0

Carl Friedrich Gauss - the man behind most of humanities understanding probably fits this description.

ldog
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0

Brian O'Kelley - king of Ad tech

0

I would posit that most really cool software came from one person. We could just as well ask "Does anyone know of any brilliantly designed software out there that is the result of a committee rather than a single individual?"

0

Paul Lutus developed Apple Writer alone in a remote cabin in Oregon. He still puts out some excellent ruby and python scripts.

0

James Clark wrote groff, sgmls, expat, and was a key contributor in creating XML and Relax NG.

0

Gabriel Weinberg, creator of DuckDuckGo.

sdtom
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0

Lennart Poettering - Author of Avahi, pulseaudio , systemd

zer0c00l
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0

Chris Crawford (of Atari, at the time) author of numerous ground-breaking games, including Eastern Front (1941) and Balance of Power.

-3

Chuck Norris. What? You didn't know he could program too? =)