Good chance it was John Carmack, probably one the top 10 programmers of all time. He basically built the Quake engine himself. There is a pretty decent analysis of it here:
Ranking programmers is as dumb as ranking musicians.
Carmack is great but you can't really say he's better than say some guy you've never heard of who wrote a bunch of absolutely brilliant algorithms inside a missile defense system and it's all super secret. Or someone who did amazing work on a compiler Carmack used or brilliant work in an OS kernel that you're never going to know about, or some AI code, or something deep within a stock exchange's platform.
Carmack's perceived greatness is elevated because almost 100% of what he has worked on is directly visible to the average consumer.
Carmack's main superpowers seem to be tons of hard work, not raw intelligence
1) Perseverance and focus: He kept rewriting the quake renderer, pushing it faster and better, where other people had long ago settled for a lesser variant or given up.
2) Try everything, even the stupid ideas. When he wrote quake, the wisdom was that the FPU was way to slow for a game. He managed to do z-divisions for blocks of 16 pixels on it, while the integer code spit out the pixels.
3) Attention to detail. The doom span renderer was sub pixel precise, which was pretty unique for its time. It looked better in a hard to define way.
4) Code quality. Doom and quake are very readable, very portable and heavily documented. The average 1-person codebase tends to be messy and undocumented, as nobody else ever takes a look. On the other hand, plenty of fixmes in there. It was unabashedly special cased where he could get away with it.
5) He consumed whatever idea he could get. BSPs were an obscure research trick before he took them and ran with it.
He had huge holes in his 3D knowledge when writing doom, as he admits himself. He didn't care until quake forced him to level up. But he could look in the mirror, say he needed to do better, and learn the extra things when he had to.
I don't know if Carmack is that much smarter than the average HNer, but he surely works a lot harder. And that's an even better compliment, in my book
Not sure where I read it, but someone writing about the history of DOOM basically said John was a machine and the machine ran on Diet Coke and pizza. As long as he had both, he could remain in the zone indefinitely, which is pretty crazy when think about all the things he accomplished that you listed.
> Not sure where I read it, but someone writing about the history of DOOM basically said John was a machine and the machine ran on Diet Coke and pizza.
I'm pretty sure I've read it in "Masters of Doom".
> Ranking programmers is as dumb as ranking musicians.
If a musician had a noticeable impact on culture and was prolific, I don't see why we can't put them in a bracket of [in top #]. The ranking is really just to illustrate my respect for his work, accomplishments, insightful communications, and continued relevance as well as impact on my life and those around me. You can call that 'dumb' if you like, but I am human just like you and am not above placing some people's accomplishments above those of others.
To me, Carmack equates more to an engineer who designed wild equipment used by sound engineers and musicians. Aside from Torvalds or Wozniak, I think most programmers are unsung, regardless of how much their products impact the world.
Most programmers are quickly forgotten if they were ever known in the first place. In terms of cultural impact, think of the programmers behind our PC or mobile operating systems, major consumer app categories like spreadsheets, word processors, photo or video editing, etc. Of course some nerds of computing history can cite folks behind all these, but it is niche trivia to most of the population.
It also seems like an era coming to a close where a solo programmer can deliver an impactful product. Who gets the credit instead? Usually an executive or entrepreneur gets the credit. Sometimes this person programmed early on, but often they either transitioned to management or started there and other programmers were responsible for delivering the product we eventually know.
> It also seems like an era coming to a close where a solo programmer can deliver an impactful product.
This is true but you have to look at it differently. There are generally two ways of looking at history: the 'great man'[0] theory, or the 'of the times' theory.
If you look at it one way Woz and Carmack and Torvalds and the others were instrumental in shaping their surroundings and without those specific people we would have lost out on basically the entire technological world as we know it.
If you look at it another way, they were inevitable -- the times were such that it was bound to happen (or at least extremely likely) because of a great confluence of events that could never be arranged or predicted, and if Woz had electrocuted himself making the Apple I power supply module then someone else would have done something similar around the same time and we end up at the same
spot (but Steve Jobs becomes a moderately successful Bay Area Benz dealer and we all use Blackberry phones with physical keyboards in 2023).
The era of an individual engineer or programmer making a paradigm shifting breakthrough in his or her basement may be over, but that just means the times have shifted into another dynamic. What that is can not be predicted, but if we do survive the oncoming crises upon us and somehow also never end up turning the planet into smoldering radioactive ash over a shipping lane dispute or something, there will be a time when such a person can be expected to emerge and do it again.
[0] excuse the masculine nature of this terminology, but unfortunately that is what it is called, though I haven't formally studied history in a while and it could have changed
I'm not sure if it would've been John Carmack in this particular case. He was more concerned with the engine and rendering side of things, less with the gameplay logic stuff. More likely it would've been either John Romero or John Cash who wrote this code, but it's hard to say for sure. Best thing we can hope for is that John Romero pitches in with his impeccable memory :D
It's a _fascinating_ snapshot into Quake's development.
I have no idea if his .plan is a record of what he, specifically, was doing, or if he was just capturing what the programming team was doing, but at the very least, it makes clear that he was aware of huge amounts of very highly specific game code issues as they were being worked on and was almost certainly deeply involved.
Hello fellow I-was-once-11-and-fascinated-by-.plan! I wasn't sure if I was the only one. St Louis in 2000 made it seem like there were only a handful of people interested in programming at all.
Hmm... 11 would put me at 19999, so I must've been more like 12 or 13. I remember that's when I started taking gamedev seriously.
I loved the video, I love this type of analysis of bugs and glitches. This comment, however, just makes me nervous. It's like my innermost worry.
I spend so much time trying to do a good job which I can be proud of and yet I always know there are bugs and I just hope not too many players notice and get annoyed by them.
And here we are, pointing out poorly written code in practically ancient software and attributing it to one particular programmer. Of course, Carmack has more than shown his worth throughout his career. But I dread the thought of a forum post pointing out mistakes I've made at work like this.
It's part of why it took me so long to dare publish articles about fun stuff I've done at work.
Honestly why care? Everyone writes bugs -- the thing is that Quake works fine -- if some quick runners want to exploit a bug 32 years later to impress each other with runs, after having dissected the code to bits to find glitches, is that really a bad mark on anyone? I don't remember anyone complaining about lightning gun glitches when Quake was being played.
I agree. Code that works well is a good thing even if not perfect and super optimized.
I’m not an elegant coder. My code isn’t perfect. It does run however and is pretty efficient mostly bug free. It does it’s useful thing and I can be proud of that.
Having gone through enough code reviews to know there is a huge amount of polish one can give code. It’s a trade off between perfect and Good enough.
I’m hopeful new languages and patterns leveraging libraries help make our code better or at least let us write more if it.
People speed run this game. Understanding every line of it is a part of the process and the reason people care who wrote what line is because it has a lot of culture and history associated with it. If you work on stuff that will make this kind of impact that makes people care like this you will feel proud having your bugs picked apart, not ashamed for having put them there in the first place. And if you don't rest easy knowing any bug you ever make probably won't see a thousandth of the effort being put into understanding and attributing it.
I think it is a good mindset to have. We must all assume that software is an imperfect thing done by imperfect beings. Even celebrate it.
On this particular case, I recommend concentrating not on the fact that there was a bug, but on the fact that the code written so many years ago is still relevant for someone today. Focus on that. Try to make something that someone will find a bug in 30 years from now.
I found this looking through Carmack's .plan files. Perhaps you will appreciate it.
Snippet:
I want bug free software. I also want software that runs at infinite speed, takes no bandwidth, is flexible enough to do anything, and was finished yesterday.
Every day I make decisions to let something stand and move on, rather than continuing until it is "perfect". Often, I really WANT to keep working on it, but other things have risen to the top of the priority que, and demand my attention.
I feel the same way, all the time. The more time I spend improving and tweaking a solution, the longer the list of remaining improvements I wish I could do.
That's why pieces I publish about my work usually contain a fairly long section about potential further improvements.
If anybody cares enough to pick over your code 30 years later, that probably means you were very successful at what you did; at the very least you had a hand in creating something people care about, which is more than most programmers can say.
His record speaks for itself. I know it is tough to imagine what it was like programming 3D engines meant to run on graphics non-accelerated PCs running DOS, without the internet knowledge or collaboration available to us now, but the stuff he was doing was absolutely revolutionary. He basically created PC gaming as we know it today by creating a market for 3D accelerators and before that by doing it in software very well. He also did this stuff in an record amount of time. From Wolfenstein 3D (1992) to Quake (1995) he made three separate engines which each revolutionized the industry one after the other.
EDIT: The metric I am using is 'impact' in an industry and in society in general -- the impact of Doom and Quake on culture and the adoption of computers and PC gaming and many other things can not be overstated. You can draw a direct line from Doom to Quake to nVidia to CUDA and machine learning if you want.
An interesting read into some of the insights that Carmack had which lead to the revolution that was Quake can be found in the "Ramblings in Realtime" articles[1] by Michael Abrash[2], who helped John develop Quake's 3D engine. Abrash wrote the rather famous "Graphics Programming Black Book", now available for free[3].
I remember he dropped Doom 3 on us with fully dynamic lighting and shadows in like fucking 2004 or something. I remember getting my hands on the engine leak (in 2003?) and absolutely getting my mind blown to see shadows dancing on the wall (at like 8 FPS on my athlonXP geforce4 rig) at something resembling real-time, in the same map that was used at the Apple developer demo where Steve Jobs announced mac support.
All of Carmack's engines were YEARS ahead of their time. Everyone was doing baked lighting and employing various gimmicks for dynamic-looking shadows, and this dude (and his team) comes in and destroys everyone with this fully-, actually-dynamic lighting system. I don't think anyone else even came close until Crysis in 2007.
If that isn't a top 10 programmer performance than I don't know what is.
> If that isn't a top 10 programmer performance than I don't know what is.
Nobody's saying he isn't brilliant. But it's not possible to declare him as a "top 10" programmer without actually taking into account all the other programmers.
I think there are at least 10 other programmers that you've never heard of, but that have had as much or more impact on society in general as Carmack did.
Isn't it enough to just say he's brilliant? Ranking programmers is a fool's errand and serves no purpose other than to devalue other brilliant programmers.
(Also, I think measuring how brilliant someone is by how much impact they've had on society doesn't make much sense. Those are two entirely different things.)
I don't think anyone here means top 10 in a strict ranking sense of the phrase. But I think Carmack very easily has a place amongst the pantheon of programming gods, whether you measure by 'brilliance' (whatever that means) or impact. He has done a ridiculous amount of innovation over the years, and set the pace for game engine and real-time rendering development for something like 20 years.
> I think Carmack very easily has a place amongst the pantheon of programming gods, whether you measure by 'brilliance' (whatever that means) or impact.
I guess? I don't know. There are so many programmers that have had a much greater overall impact and such than Carmack has (which in no way takes away from Carmack's accomplishments!) that I find it hard to say either way.
That's part of why I think trying to rank people is a bit strange. I doubt that there is even much consensus on what it takes to be a "programming god" in the first place.
Like who? I can think of Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, Linux Torvalds, Steve Wozniak, Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Richard Stallman, Edsger Dijkstra, Bill Gates, John Carmack. Maybe Alan Turing. With the exception of the real OG's I think Carmack fits in that list quite nicely.
..and hundreds or thousands of others, that signed some NDA, worked on e.g. mission-critical systems (where bugs as the ones discussed here would cost you your job) and who never got to show their work, which is OP's point.
The closest guy to Carmack today seems to be Brian Caris, who developed virtualized geometry[1], a rasterization based rendering technique where the geometric detail of static objects is adjusted to the screen resolution in real time. There is another talk (can't find it right now) where he mentions Carmack as an inspiration. I wonder what Carmack would be working on today if he was still in the game engine business.
I think DLSS doesn't do denoising. DLSS uses an ML algorithm to upscale frames using additional information like z buffer and motion vectors. Denoising is used to drastically reduce the number of required rays for ray tracing. I would guess denoising is done first, using a non-ML algorithm, and DLSS is done afterwards.
DLSS does the denoising since DLSS 1.0 see the DLSS announcement https://www.youtube.com/live/4_g_Y0W1Xn8?feature=share (pardon the crappy gaming channel, it looks like Nvidia weren’t running their own YouTube the time)
There may be some confusion between upscaling and denoising. You might notice I keep editing my comment because it’s really really hard to find old Nvidia release announcements.
Update: https://youtu.be/6O2B9BZiZjQ looks good around 3:54 Nvidia refer to “deep learning for image denoising” which to me seems like DLSS.
Ray tracing without DLSS might be a different denoising technique. Is it really slow when you turn it on ?
There's some really big innovations happening in e.g. rendering like that; I wouldn't be surprised if the complexity and work involved in just Nanite is 10x that of the whole Quake engine.
Similarly there's the work nvidia is doing, using AI technology to upscale graphics instead of rendering things at 4K.
The idea is that, the derivative came after the virtuoso. Of course what came after is more complex costs more takes more is more impressive blah blah. Dismissing those that thought the thought or solved for a problem before it was, is such a dumb thing people do.
Hell no. As skilled as Carmack is as a coder, he falls well below the pioneers for early operating systems and programming language compilers and development in terms of industry and societal impact. Even Bricklin's VisiCalc and its descendants resulting in boring old modern spreadsheet software has a better claim to lasting societal impact than Carmack's 3D engines.
> The metric I am using is 'impact' in an industry and in society in general
If you correlate against lines of code written over a lifetime then John Brunner and Vernor Vinge bubble to the top. They're my go-to examples for people who think that literature reviews "don't matter".
Kind of a fun exercise since we get to see all the different values out there in the world.
I don't think a deep analysis is required here. It is quite obvious that he'll not be the top-10 programmer on every single metric that one can imagine.
He's very good. Enough people agree. I recommend letting it at that.
Impact. He pretty much invented the FPS genre by reading a paper about Z buffers from some guy in the Navy, IIRC. All the Call Duty kiddies owe him a debt. Who knows how long it would have taken for that whole genre to get going without him?
Was Doom's geometry more complex? No room over room, no slopes, vertical axis was awkward. Feels like apples and oranges, even before considering the gameplay was also very distinct between them.
Since I’m actually a top 5 programmer of all time (self decided) I can say with confidence that Carmack is actually a top 50 programmer but no where near the top 10. He didn’t use ternaries nearly enough.
In the top 10 as well. In fact not too long ago I was asking someone to rate some piece of code and used 'from Linus / Carmack to (something shitty I don't remember)' as the metric.
I honestly have no idea how good Linus is as a programmer; he's proven his worth as a project manager, he seems to know a thing or two (to make an understatement) about operating systems, but I don't know if he's a good programmer.
* https://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/index.php
I recommend checking it out.
EDIT: i was thinking of the analysis done on Quake 2, which is more about the engine:
* https://fabiensanglard.net/quake2/index.php
while the one about is regarding the multiplayer system, which is still an amazing bit of dev.
Github:
* https://github.com/id-Software/Quake