Wow, working for Megacorp can make you a few of those at once, and none of them good. Damn you, Initech!
Now get back to work, your inane program isn’t going to code itself.
One more thing… not everyone wants to be famous.
Programmers aren’t all social beings. I realize we have to view this blog through the perspective of a programmer who chose to be essentially a programming journalist, but really, Jeff. I can’t speak for anyone else on this blog but myself, but I’d be a miserable type 7 or 8 on your scale. It’s not what I aspire to. I want to be great, and I better myself constantly. But if I never, ever have to give a lecture or a presentation to 100+ people, I won’t consider myself any less a programmer.
Oh, and Megacorp holds the code base to your hospital software. Those ‘bad programmers’ are the ones that help warn math-deficient nurses from giving you a wrong RX dosage or the correct blood type. There’s no code-hero when you have a several million line base. Trust me.
Maybe your Dead Programmer should be renamed to Immortals. Much more appropriate - dead or alive!
Somewhere on this list, Guido van Rossum and Larry Wall’s names should appear…
it seems interesting. so, can somebody rise from bad programmer to successful programmer? or from a lower level to an upper one?
Dijkstra is my personal Jesus. Everytime I code something, anything, I imagine him patting on my shoulder whenever I do something sensible and clearing his throat when I make some mistake. It’s reassuring.
the levels of programming are probably better represented by a B-tree rather than a list http://www.softwarefreedown.com
when I read this post, I didn’t think it was meant to be an exhaustive list of programmers… I guess I was wrong, because based on the comments, most people thought that was what Jeff was trying to do. No love for Bill Joy!!! ha ha http://www.vo2ov.com
love it! i’m 41 - been coding, since i was 12, and i hope to be coding for many many more years. just when things get stale, another technology/language comes along to challenge u.
the management track is for the truly uncreative - its all about following someone else’s process… they’ve been trying to dumb me down for years but my brain cells keep coming back!
excellent blog - excellent responses - thsi is what bloggin is all about
Great article! But I see too few data points.
I’m interested to know in what category do these people fall in:
Linus Torvalds
Phil Greenspun
Joel Spolsky
Anders Hejlsberg
Bill Joy
James Gosling
PHP, C, C++, Java, Python, Perl Programming Tips techniques
A good read:
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what about George Bush? I’ve heard he was a great programmer, at least he can write program to instruct troops to kill iraqi people 
hey, we’re talking about coding…not politics
Interesting. But see, any classification of any thing finally turns out nonesense. Don’t label yourself, which is pathetic.
I believe Linus Torvalds should be in lvl 7, where Bill Gates should be in lvl 6
This is a ridiculous post.
There are two types:
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Programmer - He who understands everything about the software development cycle AND the machine’s he is working on.
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Coder - He who thinks he is a programmer but just regurgitates code, occassionally creating something new from something old.
99.9999999% of the IT pro’s who think they are programmers, are in fact coders of various skillsets.
Unless you program solely in machine code or 1’s and 0s, you are a simple, replacable coder. You are not special and no one thinks you are.
And Gates, despite the stupidity of the comments here, did a LOT of coding in his early days. 16 hour days coding, working late nights coding, busting his ass coding. Doesnt mean he was the greatest coder, but he most certainly was a coder.
Comment feature: Bane of the internet. Let the idiots reign.
If we’re listing legendary programmers, second in the pantheon after Knuth: Edgar F Codd.
Unknown Programmer… hey, that’s me!
WAIT - Ruby On Rails guy and ID guy make #7, but Gosling doesn’t? This is a joke.
You really should change the post where you specify the dead programmers. People who don’t read the comments, don’t realize your point, and thinks that guys are really all dead.