How to say that someone is a great programmer?

[pheonikai]

In case of sports, the parameters are well defined for someone to be considered the best which can be quantified more or less in the form of rankings. But there is no such measure or yardstick for programmers. Which things do you look for or notice in a programmer which makes you say that he/she is a great programmer. Instances would be helpful. Thankyou.

[csbubbles]

I believe you can apply the "parameters" exactly same way to everything. They are just different.

The criteria could be:

* The time one would need to implement some particular task (build a website, application, algorithm, etc.) – you can measure it in minutes/days/months and compare.

* How much support the written piece of code would require over time – the number of bugs, the time required to fix those.

* How much effort is needed to extend the code – time spent on new features or changes built on top of that code.

* How clean the code/design is – the time another person would spend to understand the logic to get onboard to comfortably work with it after.

These are just off the top of my head, you can come up with much more, probably. I believe, everything is measurable. You just need to understand the specifics of the industry and decide what exactly to measure.

[pheonikai]

Thanks for the reply. It was really illuminating and when I think about it more, it makes all the more sense. The number of bugs, the number of times another person who is working on your code asks you something etc.

[csbubbles]

Yep, exactly. You just need to compare everything against the same context.

[Rannath]

There is NO best programmer. Every program, the metric by which a programmer could be measured, is built to serve a specific purpose, meaning you can't really compare programs in different domains. If they serve different use-cases you might not even be able to compare programmers in the same domain. The best system programmer is no better or worse than the best graphics programmer. It's similar to comparing a goalie to a centre. Beyond that programming is as often as not a team sport, you can get better results from pair programming or mob programming from one guru.

Ultimately you want to identify one of a few different types of "great" programmer:

If you want to identify an EFFICIENT programmer, see csbubbles.

If you want to identify a PERFORMANT programmer, benchmark.

If you want to identify an IDEAL programmer, think of which best suites your buissiness needs.

[samblr]

How about having a criteria as someone who has built successful repositories / architectures / products / company where they were one of main programmers ? In this forum we may have few or know who match this criteria. Can anybody share about them.

Personally I know one of architect in my previous employers. Three qualities stood out - passion, work ethic and down-to-earth apart from tech brilliance.

Passionate - you could compare him to an elite athlete. All the time practicing - in this case coding, tinkering, building.

Work ethic - crazy work ethic. More hours. Days nights did not matter. I had to go to office on two late nights. Once he was there coding and another time he was sleeping on floor.

Down to earth: he was just down to earth. very serene and easy to talk to.