Quite the gap.

The legends the article talks about are legends because they either started a project that blew up in popularity and/or solved a demanded problem with original code.

For most people writing software for a living that is gone. Its been gone since I started writing software 20 years ago. The goal post has moved. Its no longer about solving any problem. Its about hiring.

The distinction is massive. Most of the people doing this work will never encounter an important problem to solve or write original code. Instead they will use tools and modify templates. There is still some troubleshooting there, but no originality. Its like being a plumber. Plumbers still make good money, but they aren't engineers. Now, with AI being pushed on everybody even becoming something like a plumber is becoming a distant gap for the next generation.

The most clear exception are hobbyists, which has always been there as an exception through my years writing software. The only real distinction between most of these hobbyists and the legends is obscurity. The very real distinction between the hobbyists and less original professional is time spent practicing.

I wrote an essay and sent it to Chomsky once. He wrote back that he probably won't have time to read it.

Some years ago I realized that I can just start sending emails to an OSS mailing list. Without introduction just starting to post as if I belonged there. I had already made some grammar fixes more than five years before that but I started to comment and critique submissions. And submitting my own patches. Now checking the mailing list is daily habit. Unfortunately I didn't have time to post the second version of a submission on the bus today (another documentation fix).

People, and especially in my culture, are very good at staying out of places where they do not belong through self-policing alone. Unfortunately to the point where at least I do get stuck in narrow patterns and never even consider certain opportunities.

I also want to communicate with someone and have programming conversations. There's no one around me to talk about programming with. I'm the only programmer around. Aside from AI and books, I sometimes want to talk with a real person.

Along similar lines: many of your favorite authors, musicians, and creators have public email addresses and seem to love getting emails. I’ve started writing notes with my kids to their favorite authors with ideas and always a thank you note.

I’ve gotten replies from authors on NYT best sellers lists, musicians, and more.

People like to be appreciated.

It's not a great time to be a programmer, it's a great time to be a marketer that can program passably. While 10x programmers are getting ignored on social media, you can use your marketing skills to hype your half baked project into a few thousand GitHub stars, then into investment from a VC.

The exception is game programmers. With AI/engines, making games has never been easier, Steam takes a lot of the guesswork out of packaging/release, and the moat in games is taste/refinement which is very AI resistant.

When I started working in software I took a job in a city different than mine, so I had to go there to live alone, and the job was by myself in a room with no windows. Most lonely 2 years of my life.

I wrote an email to Mike Pall once and got a very refreshing reply.

Daniel Stenberg is not on the list but he is also a very active programmer on social media like LinkedIn that you can interact with.

One should go for it if they enjoy it, yes. On the other hand, life and work is not meant to be spent in full time worldwide interaction either.

If someone want to interact with people like Linus Torvalds, they should be aware that in his case he publicly admitted the way he interacted with other was toxic[1]. To be clear, it’s no personal attack against him, it’s about the kind of interaction that can and does occur with largely celebrated figures in general. If anything at least in that case there is some recognition of the issue, though fair credit should probably given also to all people beyond the scene who certainly made tremendous effort for this to happen.

And things like popular micro-blogging platforms are notoriously known to cause interaction going toxic[2].

Just because something is possible doesn’t mean its a nice path to thrive for everybody.

To each their own judgment, but at least consider the tradeoffs.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/after-years-of-ab...

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07229-y

I want only one thing from the above list;

Somebody sit with Fabrice Bellard and pick his brain on how he thinks, how he organizes projects, how he studies so many different domains, how he implements them, views on work-life balance etc. etc.

Basically i want a brain dump of Fabrice Bellard.

I constantly wonder what life was like, then, for the earliest inventors, scientists, and curious minds in our history. Surely they didn't have many people to bounce ideas or build things with. How did they find the strength to persist in their interests? These days, it's far easier to quit when you cannot find community since you can distract yourself with many kinds of entertainment instead; and with bleak economic outlook everywhere, the very act of persistence itself can feel rather pointless.

I think it's great that you can still follow people like Lawrence Paulson and Moshe Vardi. It's not only a great time for programmers but also for computer scientists. Platforms like LinkedIn make it easy to share a quick observation or question, and occasionally getting a reaction from leading researchers is one of the things that keeps me interested in the field.

Not intending to nitpick, but it's interesting that Chris Lattner is listed simply as the creator of Swift. I would have thought his work on LLVM and Mojo would have been at least as well known.

Imagine being Andrew Tridgell and watching your inbox blow up today with thousands of emails from complete strangers, all just saying hi and wanting to casually chat with you. He's probably scratching his head right now and wondering what is going on

Wow, I was always amazed by Andrew Tridgill's prolific contributions to ardupilot / mavlink when I did some minor work on those. Had no idea he was behind rsync and samba.

Amazing how these people are even reachable via phone, their numbers are pretty easy to find.

This seems to be a submarine advertisement for a telephony API startup.

It seems like it's been around for a few years so it probably isn't vibe-coded, but I do wonder if even small services like this will inevitably be gobbled up by AI. Like I know it probably isn't the case but I've become so jaded now that I'm looking at their teams page and wonder if these are even real people.

Yes it's an amazing time for programmers but only in a "twilight of the gods" sense. The time for community passed about a decade ago, before Twitter turned into a Nazi bar and everything went entirely to shit. There's a little bit left but it's dying fast. Why would any of these people want to waste their time talking to the community that wants to assimilate their work and replace it with the mediocre shit dribbled from a Claude prompt? These people don't need your emails, they're probably already deluged with bots as it is.

> Take the opportunity to send one of them an email or tweet.

But ... why?

I don't understand why I should write an email to Linus. Or Phil. Or Pete. Or Joe. I can barely keep up with the influx of existing emails as-is. Do I really want to extend to this and have to read through even MORE emails now?!

Look mom, no hands!

Will there ever be any more “legendary” programmers ever again now with the rise of AI basically making any coding accomplishments unimpressive?

Why stop at these people. You might as well reach out to Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Jansen Huang. There's more to life than tech companies. Why not reach out to the president. It takes less effort than you might think to reach out to anyone in the world. It is truly a small place.

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