Programmers 1-100, everyone else 1-10

Talking with Jonathan Gay the other day reminded me that I used to use him as an example of how if people from every normal profession could be measured from 1-10, that the best programmers were so much better then everybody else, that they needed to be measured from one to 100. The story was that back in the mid '80's when Silicon Beach Software was working on the first real paint and vector combined graphics program, SuperPaint, that there had been a programmer working on a year to get the bezier curve code working.  Jonathan, who had worked on Dark Castle, previously as a kid, came back from college that year on a two week spring break, and rewrote the code from scratch.  I can't think of a profession where the best cook can produce a hundred times faster and better then another professional. Did I mention that he later on ended up creating this cool intelligent graphics program that Macromedia ended up acquiring...what was it called?  Oh yeah, Flash...  He's working on a new startup in my brier patch, Photo/story sharing, and of course, there is some exceptional stuff that he's built.

I've encountered a few of these code gods over the years, Bill Appleton being another (Creator of SuperCard, and the reason I ended up at Silicon Beach, Jay Fenton, who created VideoWorks, that eventually became Director and the father of modern animation systems.  (For the longest time after he left, the people who worked on the code he left behind were working on it much the same way that earth engineers might try and build a space ship from an alien engine that had been recovered from an area 51 crash site.  No one really understood how it worked, but they kept sticking stuff on top of it, praying it would keep working.  These code gods can sometimes be extremely temperamental (not the case with Jonathan), but annoyance with the less fleet of creation is a price that both they (and we) need to pay for creation that comes as close to wizardry as exists in our world.