Ask HN: Who is the best programmer in the world right now?

I'm going to rise to the bait and nominate Jon Skeet http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet, because his answers have helped so many others by the leaderboard at http://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=Reputation&filter=all

ill rise to the bait also and nominate john carmack. i think its probably him or an unknown to me developer from the quake/unreal engines.. just because they optimized the best engines and so many millions of $ were made from their minutes spent coding. also could be gaben or a linux/win kernel dev... maybe?

me, because i said so

I find Fabrice Bellard's work remarkable and impressive

That's easy, the best programmer in the world, right now and forever, is Mel[1].

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.jokes/k2JVKQzJSp...

How do you measure "bestness" exactly? Is it measured in the number of daily GitHub/BitBucket/whatever commits or in the number of stackoverflow answers? Or is it measured in the overall impact on the world (which is hard to quantify by itself, btw)?

Define "the best", and it won't take much time to figure out who it is.

P.S. Personally, my choice would be Paul Graham (measured by the number of his essays I read and liked).

The people working on LibreSSL?

I don't know if there is any 'best programmer in the world' and if such a concept make sense.

But some programmers seems to be very productive, in top of my head:

Fabrice Bellard (http://bellard.org/) : He create a lot of high impact project including FFMPEG

John Carmack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack): Video game legend that create DOOM

Josh Parnell (http://joshparnell.com/) : Young programmer developing outstanding games alone.

The nice guy ;) behind linux and git.

I think the people behind TrueCrypt deserve some recognition - they solved an extremely difficult problem much better than it had ever been solved before. It's unfortunate they never got Windows 8 compatibility before shutting down.

ruby on rails fan guy here and i adore what ddh has created.

Linus torvalds...?

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

I guess this is very subjective. Github should do some analysis based on code commits and should post top ranking programmers.

This is like asking who makes the world's best coffee.

I think there are physicists working on weather, LHC, astrophysics problems which probably blow-away any of the commercial guys.

Steve Wozniak!