D. J. Bernstein

I have to agree with you on JQuery. It runs on multiple browsers too and performs exceptionally well. It's gotta be one of my all time favorite pieces of software.

What is this, the Hill Valley International Programming Tournament?

People have arguments like this all the time in the sports sector, and at least there you can come up with all kinds of statistics and recordings, but what do you have for programmers? If they produced Open Source, you might have the end result of their work, but that would exclude a large part of the work force. And even then, what are your points of measurements? Just the amount of bugs? Total? Per year? Per line? Meh.

And as a final, somewhat unrelated note: Which I have nothing against Mr. Bernstein himself, I've got a pretty low opinion of most djb fanboys I've encountered in the past...

(read this message with a background of "arguing about the best programmer is anyway silly")

djb is in no way the best programmer of the world, but he is a very smart programmer, and probably an even better mathematician. And now, my arguments about why he is not the best programmer.

1) djb software is not the most elegant software around at all. Actually trying to write high performance and bug free software his style is the most procedural possible, with very little abstractions layers.

2) his software is well known to be uneasy to configure. There are qmail hackers around. When there are -hackers around it's a bad sign about the quality of the interface between the program and the rest of the system and the system administrator itself.

3) Djb played no role at all in the programming languages world. AFAIK he never suggested some new idea for programming languages or new directions that are now considered important. You can't be the best without being influential in the field.

4) Djb newer wrote big systems that were crucial for the programming world. Qmail and djbdns can disappear tomorrow and everything will be up and running anyway. GCC or the Linux Kernel are a different matter.

I can continue, but I think 1+2+3+4 are already enough to deny the argument aaronsw is trying to push in the article.

It's hard to overstate how great jQuery is. I'm always surprised at how easy it makes things. I remember the bad old days, spending hours researching the different ways to reference dom objects, trying to find a method that worked in more than one browser. With jQuery, you really can just code it once, and it works everywhere.

I agree, but aaronsw must come at an issue as a raging partisan. I know that in economics, philosophy, politics, and apparently best programmer ever!!!, he always comes at the issue with a deeply contentious point of view from an entrenched idealogical camp.

It's kind of a shame because of the the advantages of being young is being able to approach a field without having to take sides. Meaningful dialog and inquiry void of motivated reasoning are beautiful things. Unfortunately, some people need an argument.