That's understood in the comment which explicitly indicates that there are many programming circles and that Bellard is known in a number of them (but not all).
eg: I grew up in the Australian Kimberley region (kind of remote), spent decades in geophysical mapping, multi channel data processing, computational algebra, and other odd niches, have no real interest in SV, and am quite familiar with Bellard's work.
Oh, yes. That was a straight-face answer to "who DHH is", not anything to contradict or argue anyone's point. I never heard of the initialism in any other context either.
If you did "web stuff" in the early 2000s (like 2005-2010). You'd probably know who he is. He did Ruby on Rails, a backend web framework.
But that was also very Start-up and America focussed. So if you did web dev in some other country and didn't have colleagues who were into that culture you still might've missed the name.
TBH the biggest difference is him being more vocal.
I'm pretty sure most of the people who did "web stuff" at the time and used twitter (key point maybe) know him simply because you'd often see his tweets. Regardless of coutry (I'm from Russia, for exampl)
DHH markets himself much better. His company (basecamp), in a sense, revolves around his public persona and he's unapologetic about this. It's the same with all of his projects (e.g. Omarchy recently).
I'm not saying DHH is more widely known than Fabrice Bellard. I'm saying that it really depends on your audience. I can think of many colleagues over the years who would know who David is, but not Fabrice.
(Also, I specifically chose DHH as somebody who's highly unlikely to show up in the same discussion as Fabrice Bellard, not because I'm a fan of his. Judging from the replies, I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations!)
eg: I grew up in the Australian Kimberley region (kind of remote), spent decades in geophysical mapping, multi channel data processing, computational algebra, and other odd niches, have no real interest in SV, and am quite familiar with Bellard's work.
No idea who DHH is though.