D. Richard Hipp is up there for me.

I love the minimalism of his programs, SQLLite and Fossil. Also involved in Tcl, my favourite language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._Richard_Hipp

That's far too subjective of a question to have a specific answer, but obviously it's Melvin Kaye: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

Fabrice Bellard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard

"best" is a relative term, but in terms of technology we all use every day I would say either Linus Torvalds or Jeff Dean are up there among the best for sure

Nasir Gebelli. Wrote Apple 2 games by dictating bytes typed into the mini-assembler, went on to write/co-design the early Final Fantasy titles. Legend.

You'd have to come up with the criteria for "best" but as an old hacker, "from MIT or Bell Labs" comes to mind as where to look. Maybe some of their spinoffs, but those sites did amazing things with basically nothing.

You will never know, for all they do is delete and refactor.

Any of the top coders from the major demoscenes.

RMS

Mike Evanston