Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

220 pointsdebanjan16356 comments

What are some single person creation that have stood the test of time. The creation, at present, may be under the umbrella of some big corp. But the entire core of it was developed and maintained by a single person. Like Minecraft.

And I am not talking about only tech project creations. Anything extraordinary that comes to your mind?

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The Clojure programming language was a single person effort in the first years and all of the design and implementation was done by Rich Hickey in the first version (2 years of work, not counting previous experience).

He was burned out from the state of commercial programming around the time and funded a sabbatical with his pension savings to work on Clojure. He had at least 3 attempts to bridge Common Lisp and the JVM or CLR runtimes and he had formed strong opinions on the need for Clojure to be hosted.

He kept up doing 90% of the work with the next few versions and even today it he calls all the shots on its development, it not being a "bazaar" style open source project. Of course it being open source anyone is free to write their own patches and make forks, but generally contributions are more likely to be accepted by the community as libraries, not language changes.

The whole story has been submitted here a few times and is quite interesting: https://download.clojure.org/papers/clojure-hopl-iv-final.pd...

It’s also of course in the fundamental nature of Lisp that you can change the language by importing stuff rather than actually editing the core implementation.

Clojure somewhat limits that by not having reader macros

Clojure has explicitly walked back some of that flexibility of "changing the language" by deciding against reader macros in return for better interoperability of packages.

Yeah I was about to highlight this, for example the core.async library bringing "go channels".

Like the `while` loop is not "part of the language", it is a macro which rewrites it as a `loop`. Also `for` is just a macro, feel free to write your own version without needing to fork the language itself.

This might be a difficult concept to understand to people who have only used Python, JS, C# etc.

There is video version of this paper:

https://www.pldi21.org/prerecorded_hopl.11.html

An intern I met a few years back built a Farnsworth fusor while he was in high school. He showed me pictures of it in operation, complete with some really cool shots of the plasma.

It occurred to me a few years later that the helium atoms he snapped together will likely survive until they are swallowed up by a black hole or maybe have a front row seat to a supernova or gamma ray burst. So likely hundreds of billions if not trillions of years.

It'll be a bit of an anti-climax, compared to some of that stuff. Those helium atoms are likely to be fuel for our sun somewhere along the line when it's burning down and becoming a white dwarf. Our star isn't big enough to do the supernova thing.

Off topic but in a sci fi hypothetical, would there be a way to make out sun bigger to go supernova ?

I could be wrong but I don't believe there's enough mass in our solar system for it to be close. Solar systems do merge with one another, stars bring other stars into their orbit, etc. It would take something like that, I believe.

Not any way that wouldn't just let us move to a star that will go supernova, I don't think. I just looked up the mass of the solar system, and got the gut-punch answer of 1.0014 solar masses. Considering that it seems to take 8 or so times as much mass as the sun for a star to experience a supernova, we could trivially just move all the non-star mass in the solar system elsewhere for several fewer orders of magnitude of effort.

Well, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will be merging, so there's an infinitesimal chance of a stellar collision with our Sun. (The odds of any stellar collision are, ahem, astronomically low, but you asked)

Throwing out some undercooked ideas for supernova-ing a star, from possible to impossible:

1. Throw more mass into it, ideally 1+ stars under their own power via Shkavov thruster.

2. Compress it physically with mirrors and particle/photon beams (see inertial confinement fusion)

3. Compress it magnetically with incredulously powerful magnetic fields (see tokamak fusion).

4. Compress it gravitationally by putting a black hole in its center.

5. Make it more explodey by converting half of its mass into antimatter.

Really? That's interesting. I guess for some reason I had never considered that the sun would be taking in fresh fuel from is atmosphere. That is a little less exciting, but only a little bit.

maybe think of it as "ash" the newly fused element is more massive than the ones it came from and sinks to the bottom (core)

When enough "ash" is accumulated (and the star is still big enough) the previous ash begins fusing into some new heavier "ash" rinse and repeat until you get to iron "ash" but no further.

the reason is; every fusion lighter than iron is exothermic

two atoms fuse into something bigger than either, but smaller than both, plus releasing some energy (yay).

when you get to fusing iron you need a ball about 20 miles in diameter and fusing does not give up energy, fusing iron needs to take energy from its environment.

good thing it is not in the middle of a star big enough to grow a twenty mile ball of iron.

and that kids is where supernova come from once iron fusion starts it all goes in moments collapsing the core and the star above where the core was "falls" into that space gravitationally propelled with enough speed that when it hits the opposite side (falling just as fast in the other direction) everything fuses into "whatever"

that is about as exciting as it gets in this universe

I do get that part, but I like your description.

The thing that I was interested in is whether or not a helium atom in the Earth‘s atmosphere has a way to be sucked into the fusing layer at some point. It just seems from everything that I’ve learned over the years that there’s a net outflow of that would likely keep the little atom some distance away even if it left Earths gravity well.

I see, if you are not already part of the "in crowd" below the photo-sphere can you get past the solar wind bouncers.

I don't know, but think it would be tough for a lone atom.

> The thing that I was interested in is whether or not a helium atom in the Earth‘s atmosphere has a way to be sucked into the fusing layer at some point.

It seems to me there are three possible fates for that helium, and two of them involve being used up by stellar fusion. The helium atoms get somehow pulled into the sun and so eventually get used up in a fusion reaction, the sun expands during its giant phase and envelops the Earth and the helium eventually gets used up in a fusion reaction, or the helium nuclei gets propelled out of the solar system with the solar wind.

It'd actually be fun to estimate the odds of each option but I honestly have no idea. #3 feels like a long shot.

Atom X by Leopold is a good short story similar to this idea of a single atom’s travels. https://www.audubon.org/magazine/may-june-1942/from-archives...

thanks for the short story

What's the ballpark startup cost to get it up to supernova volume?

Would scaling up production of Farnsworth fusors help?

high capex

Leaseback. Think of the writedown! There's a _lot_ of money desperate for any kind of return. No, no, hear me out. You've got a couple of billion burning a hole in your pocket, right? And nothing that really looks unicorn material right now. So... we create this fund. It can't lose... it's got rocket science, so we grab all the Space X FOMOs. It's really really complicated to do, got ML stamped all over it. It's green. We'll peg it to a crypto; that'll get the speculators, and give us liquidity when the unicorn does come around... but you won't want to pull out.. I'm telling you, this is the biggest exit you'll ever see. It's a supernova!

List of video games supposedly developed by just one person: https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/the-14-best-games-developed...

I say supposedly because I know Jonathan Blow paid someone to do all the art for Braid, and licensed all the music (I even saw him demo Braid before release with his programmer art at GDC back in 2008, it did not look anywhere near as pretty, so he made the right choice). But the artwork was so extensive I'm not quite sure that really counts for your criteria.

That may be true for some of the others in the list as well, if that's the case. Stardew Valley I know was all one person, though. Also I really enjoyed Gorogoa, even though it's a smaller game, and that was done by a single guy who quit his cushy tech job and spent 7 years teaching himself how to draw and make games before he released it. It's a super clever interactive comic panel puzzle game that was well-received, though. Think it's on Xbox Game Pass right now.

Lucas Pope is for sure a solo dev. He wrote a custom shader for Obra Dinn while he was also writing the storyline. It's a pretty incredible feat.

A custom shader is an incredible feat?

Well, no, but arguably that one was: https://danielilett.com/2020-02-26-tut3-9-obra-dithering/

(But yes it's a bit weird not to say that the feat was, uh, making that whole game).

Here’s a pretty wonderful timelapse of Pope getting the player’s hand working in the game: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IQdpeN_OERM

I have no game programming experience. What is a shader and what other things needs are required to make a 3d object realistic. I think wireframe and then lighting is another. Seems shading is yet another which provides skin. Other than animation is there anything else?

A shader is the human-editable code that gets compiled into the GPU to do graphics rendering. In terms of 3D objects, "wireframe" is broken into vertices and fragments, where vertices are points in space and fragments are the interpolated positions between vertices. You pass any information you want to the shader from your main CPU process (e.g. time elapsed, screen resolution, textures you want to use, click events, random variables you conjured) and the shader executes whatever you code you wrote for it -- maybe it adds a blur effect, thresholds colors into black/white, mines bitcoin, it just executes whatever shader code you wrote, however creative you wanted to be. Some really cool examples at shadertoy.com

> say supposedly because ...

... because they did not write the compiler for their game.

Yeah, I feel like you kind of need similar categories as you see in speed running. For example, there are 100% speed runs, any% speed runs, no glitch speed runs, etc.

Similarly, building an entire game from nand gates is a different kind of impressive than using an existing game engine + buying commodity art assets. However, using an existing game engine / art assets will probably result in something that looks better and can be more ambitious.

> ... because they did not write the compiler for their game.

That's like saying a painting isn't a single person creation because the artist didn't make their own brushes from scratch. Maybe true technically, but splitting hairs to the point that it makes the conversation about something else entirely.

I, pencil is an interesting essay, but it's not what OP is asking about, I don't think.

For sure. "And did you mine the sand and process the silicon for that computer? I don't think so."

hold on now, don't tell me you were using preexisting atoms to facilitate your art? I guess all great artists really do steal

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe.

There are quite a few two-person teams for indie games, one artist and one developer (more often it's three people, but two people is common also). I doubt most people would consider those teams a "single person creation".

In Braid's case, it was one developer and he contracted out the artwork, just as much artwork as in those two-person teams. So is it really a single person creation? It either could or it couldn't depending on your criteria (if he made all the critical decisions, some might say he is, while others care more about people who can both code and do art, two different fields that it's rare to find one person that can do both of them well). That's all I'm saying.

Also a compiler is a tool, much like a hammer is to a carpenter. If you want to get that precise then there's no point asking the question, because short of "I found some pretty rocks on the ground and stacked them", there wouldn't be hardly anything that would count as a single person creation.

> In Braid's case, it was one developer and he contracted out the artwork, just as much artwork as in those two-person teams. So is it really a single person creation?

Exactly, by the same logic Donkey Kong was made by a single person. The art and design was by Shigeru Miyamoto and the development was outsourced to a team of six.

I guess this is a joke because he is writing the compiler (and language, Jai) for his new game. I think he has a team now though.

To make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe

Every day is less impressive to create an entire product by one self, the ammount of tools created to simplify or automate common tasks give us a lot of work done.

But the expectations rise too.

I highly recommend the Braid soundtrack.

Breakout. Built by Steve Wozniak, solely. Exploited by Steve Jobs, Solely. For Atari.

Chuck E Cheeses - Founded by founder of Atari, Solely.

> Chuck E Cheeses - Founded by founder of Atari, Solely.

Really stretching the definition of solely when you have to ignore the people who did all the actual work in creating chuck e cheeses - i can “create” a restaurant, but without cooks, servers, hosts, graphic designers, construction/reno people, etc. it’s not going to be fun for the whole family

extrapolating that idea into PC video games makes it seem ridiculous; the solo-produced video game wouldn't run anywhere without the work of hundreds of thousands of individuals within the computer field -- but I wouldn't consider the people who worked on , for example, SMD resistors , to be collaborators with the video game production.

in other words ; 'cooks, servers' are generic components of a restaurant; the 'fun for the whole family' bit comes in as part of a custom set of things on top of the generic restaurant experience that were thought of and attributed to the people responsible for the concept -- in this case the Founder.

I disagree. There is a categorical difference between using tools, markets and platforms others made and hiring staff who control the output. It’s like using an open source framework (ruby on rails, say) vs hiring or contracting a team of devs. The founder of chuck e cheese hired a graphic designer who had creative input, cooks who designed the menu, even managers who came up with hiring practices and things like that. To discount that input is to be elitist, you can’t convince me otherwise.

Braid shouldn't be on there. While it was done by a single programmer, he didn't do the artwork. He was smart enough to hire someone with good taste.

This does not go back very far does it. Must have been a fair number of iconic games written by a single developer in the eight-bit era.

Lords Of Midnight by Mike Singleton springs to mind, as does Sandy White's astonishing Ant Attack.

I'm sure there's a bunch if you go back to early arcade days or Atari/NES, like you said. But I had a hard time finding them with a Google search.

Also if you count Flash/mobile games, there's a bunch there too. I would count in that instance. I released several Flash games back in the day where I did the code, sometimes art (sometimes I collaborated with an artist), sometimes I did the music too, and at least some of the sound effects (any that couldn't be generated with a synthesizer I purchased). And I released one game on iOS/Xbox 360 where I did everything as well.

But they were tiny games compared to behemoths like Stardew Valley.

An interesting solo game dev is also Jason Rohrer [1, 2]. I'm not a gamer, but I found his frugal work and life philosophy inspiring.

1: http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/

2: https://usesthis.com/interviews/jason.rohrer/

https://www.nirsoft.net/about_nirsoft_freeware.html

Tiny utilities (typically under 100 kb), no ads, available for free, and they do exactly what they say very efficiently. The site has been around since 2001.

In the same spirit, sysinternals tools.

Not only does he offer the gift of extremely well-made, small, ad-free tools, but also a blog full of tips for using them:

https://blog.nirsoft.net/

The FreeDOS operating system [1], started in 1994 by Jim Hall. Several critical parts of the system (e.g. the kernel) were written by others, but he is still coordinating the project in 2022. They released version 1.3 just recently.

Charles Childers' work on the tiny Retro Forth language [2] is also worth pointing out. It was started by Tom Novelli, but according to interwebs, Childers took over in 2001. Really cool language if you like tiny VM-based systems and forth.

Another tiny one-man language is PicoLisp [3]. Created by Alexander Burger in around 1988, and he's still the maintainer. He has been using it in commercial application development ever since.

Today, I'm wishing a long and healthy life to Virgil Dupras' Collapse OS! [4]

EDIT:

Another project I really like is Willus.com's k2pdfopt [5], a small cross-platform tool that optimizes pdf files for mobile readers. Started in around 2011; judging by the website, very probably a single-person thing.

One more is, edbrowse, a "command line editor browser" with ed-like command language [6]. Originally written in 2002 by Karl Dahlke for blind users, but might be interesting to many others as well because of its scripting abilites.

Ah, and also mhwaveedit [7], Magnus Hjorth's wave editor, developed by him since around 2002. And Mark Tyler's mtpaint [8], which was apparently very much inspired by mhwaveedit.

A fascinating single-person made digital audio workstation is Non DAW by Jonathan Moore Liles [9], started in around 2006. I've used it a lot, great modular design, ran really well on an old Thinkpad T42.

Serenity OS [10] has also been in development for 3 years. Andreas Kling's amazing effort.

Possibly Dwarf Fortress [11] would also almost count as a two-man project, by Tarn and Zach Adams, going on since 2002.

Nils M. Holm's creations also deserve a mention for sure. Scheme 9 From Empty Space, Klong array language, several books, etc [12]. Really inspiring guy.

Not wishing to turn HN into Wikipedia, so I'll stop here. The dedication behind this kind of projects is amazing, really.

1: https://www.freedos.org/

2: http://retroforth.org/

3: https://picolisp.com/

4: http://collapseos.org/

5: https://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/

6: http://edbrowse.org/

7: https://github.com/magnush/mhwaveedit

8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtPaint

9: http://non.tuxfamily.org/

10: http://serenityos.org/

11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_Fortress

12: http://t3x.org/s9fes/

I'm surprised (or I missed some part of the entire thread) nobody mentioned Bittorrent! The entire protocol and the original client was designed by one person: Bram Cohen. Think about some of the most efficient way to distribute large data over the internet and there is one single mind behind it. Of course, there are plenty of fancy GUI-powered clients today but the very original idea belongs to one person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen

The "Cat's Eye" reflector used on roads was invented by Percy Shaw [1] in the 1930s. It's arguably saved miliions of lives and is found all around the world. It is a design that's simple, passive, robust, cheap and very effective, making it one of the all-time great inventions

[1] Richard Hollins Murray contributed to the idea

It also has the distinction of being the cheapest way that anyone can verify that human artifacts are on the Moon, by bouncing a laser off one of several retroreflectors left behind by the Apollo missions.

You can't quite prove from there that humans were down there as well, but let's say it pushes the balance of evidence in the right direction.

There's a convincing chain of evidence that the retroreflectors were placed by humans, but while I can probably verify there are good reflectors there now, I can't verify there weren't good reflectors there before the mission. I didn't have access to lasers back then, when they were quite expensive and I wasn't alive.

Alright, granted: there is at least one sheep in Scotland, which is black at least on one side.

You could record where the reflectors are and how many you observe today. Then, assuming your progeny hold sufficient trust in you and your memory, your children would be able to compare your notes with their future notes, by which time NASA will have placed additional retroreflectors on the moon. The difference would be proof that we've been to the moon.

The lunar reflectors are corner cubes. The original cats eye reflectors were glass spheres.

Richard Hollins Murray is somewhere in my ancestry (Murray is a family name), probably a very distant relative. God forbid someone mentions the cat's eye at a family party, though, because all of the great-aunts and great-uncles get up in arms about how Murray's idea was "stolen" and how Murray was the true inventor of the cat's eye. I don't think any of them really know the history (I didn't know his name was Richard before I saw his this post) but I'm not going to argue with a gang of riled-up octogenearians.

Surprised no one mentioned git. Made over the course of a single week by Linus Torvalds,

Wait, what? One week? How much coffee was necessary for that?

Normal finnish consumtion, about 0.2 kg of beans per week.

I thought I drank a ton of espresso every day. Then I visited Helsinki.

The core of Git isn't that complicated. A merkle tree backed by a content-addressable store. That's very much in the realm of possible within a week. It wasn't very easy to use in it's first iteration. All of the porcelain that has been built around it is where 90% of the development has gone.

Where by "porcelain" I assume you mean "easy to mishandle and break" ;)

I'm certainly one of those people who think git makes stupid mistakes a little too easy to do, so I'm on board with that definition.

Heh, an unintentional consequence of word choice :) “Porcelain” is used in contrast to “plumbing.” Both terms are used in the gut documentation to differentiate the more complex, user-facing features of Git (e.g. `git commit`) from the raw features used by other tool authors (e.g. `git for-each-ref`)

Wait, it used to be even harder to use?

You have no idea.

See Ken Thompson's monologue about creating Unix in 3 weeks: https://youtu.be/EY6q5dv_B-o?t=1372

Programmers used to be pretty damn productive.

It was amazing that within ~24hrs of Linus releasing `.git` there were corresponding implementations of the backing data store within ~1 week for all the other "major" competing version control systems (eg: hg, svn, darcs) and written in just about every possible language.

The core of git is brutally simple and efficient, and maps incredibly well to "a linked list (and hash) of files serialized to disk".

Someone wrote somewhere "I used to wonder if Linus was a genius but Git proves it to be true. Anybody could have (re-)written a *NIX implementation, but Linus invented Git from whole cloth."

https://perl.plover.com/classes/git/samples/slide005.html

https://perl.plover.com/classes/git/samples/slide009.html

But, he didn't.

Linus copied the design from Monotone, by Grayson Hoare (who also made the original pre-pre-1.0 Rust).

Graydon. (Damn auto-correct!)

https://lkml.org/lkml/2005/4/6/121

"PS. Don't bother telling me about subversion. If you must, start reading up on "monotone". That seems to be the most viable alternative, but don't pester the developers so much that they don't get any work done. They are already aware of my problems ;)"

time for monotone to be rewritten in Rust

Time for Git using SQLite for back-end storage.

Git has corrupted its own store too many times for me ever to trust it anymore. Almost ready to switch to Fossil.

Actually it's very likely that Git is exposing a failing or unreliable underlying storage medium (or memory?). I can't find the reference for it, but b/c git is so aggressive about actually checking hashes, it sometimes exposes unreliability that gets attributed to git, but is actually the hardware.

Check for "memtester", "smartctl", and "badblocks" ... understand what they do and see if they turn up anything.

Possibly, but audits have also shown Git not correctly handling file system error reports. We also have file systems not correctly handling disk error reports. Last I saw, volume managers were not passing media error reports through to file systems. And, Intel has done its part to eliminate ECC from memory and buses.

I guess what I am saying is that there seems to be more than enough blame to tar everybody.

I would say every year of quality experience a person has is equivalent to X mg of caffeine so at Torvalds level he might not have been above a normal level.

After years of using other architectures and thinking really hard about what worked and what didn't.

And Notch would obsessively play Dwarf Fortress before writing any code for Minecraft. The distinction between influence and contribution is a fine line.

It's worth studying so aspirants understand no achievement exists in a vacuum, but not a means to divide something between solo and collaboration.

I thought you'd say Infiniminer by Zachtronics.

Does that mean that a less competent developper could write a more intuitive alternative in a few months ?

Probably! I think this space is ripe for exactly that to happen.

Absolutely. There's nothing fundamentally complicated in Git. The most complex things are the merging and diffing algorithms (but I presume the week-old git just used GNU diff and patch).

Mercurial?

Exactly this. I think that git is only popular currently because everyone else is using it. (That and GitHub).

hg ftw!

Isn’t it also because Linux itself is controlled by Git?

Or fossil, built on top of SQLite.

Intuition is really the problem with git. Most developers that use git daily don't actually have a deep understanding of the domain model powering it. They don't know why it's doing things, or why they need to do things in a certain way.

It's terribly unintuitive.

But it's also so powerful that nearly every use case you might have can be done with it.

I'm going to ask you, instead oh Google, what do I need to learn about git?

I think it's worth noting that Linus was influential in BitKeeper's design previously, and if you know both systems, git feels like a cleaned-up BitKeeper that uses from-scratch formats instead of trying to ride on top of SCCS.

Just about anything created by djb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein

Daemontools, a whole bunch of ciphers, tons of otero software. The man is a living legend.

The modern theory and application of logarithms are largely the work of one mathematician working in isolation (which is highly unusual):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_logarithms * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Napier

Isaac Newton: His work on calculus, optics and gravity was all done in isolation (the university was closed as a precaution against the plague).

He supposed to have said "If I have seen further than other men, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants." . But this may just have been a mean comment at the expenses of his small-of-stature rival, Hooke. (Newton was both a genius and an arsehole)

John Napier seems to have been an absolute gem of a person.

> Another act which Napier is reported to have done, which may have seemed mystical to the locals, was when Napier removed the pigeons from his estate, since they were eating his grain. Napier caught the pigeons by strewing grain laced with alcohol throughout the field, and then capturing the pigeons once they were too drunk to fly away.

Is this the basis for Danny Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl?

Bingo Card Creator: https://www.bingocardcreator.com/

Exiled Kingdoms: https://www.exiledkingdoms.com/forum/index.php

Stardew Valley: https://www.stardewvalley.net/

Instapaper: https://www.instapaper.com/

MeetWell: https://www.meetwell.app/

Rollercoaster Tycoon/Transport Tycoon

Dwarf Fortress by Tarn Adams

Also worth noting, Chris Sawyer wrote the original Roller Coaster Tycoon code directly in Assembly. It's probably one of the reasons the simulation game worked so well on earlier systems.

I thought DF was written by both Zach and Tarn Adams, and not just Tarn alone.[1]

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xypb5/the-dwarf-fortress-cr...

IIRC Zach was only temporarily involved but I could not be remember it right.

Pinboard - https://pinboard.in/ is a one-man developed bookmarking/tagging/archival service that's been a consistent featureset and price for many years now without any delusions of selling out or exponential growth.

I love it and use it religiously, I just tracked down an article I remembered reading in 2015 the other day just by searching a keyword.

That site saved my bookmarks when Delicious went bonkers, and I much prefer it anyway — well worth the small price.

I'd say literature come to mind the most.

A Tale of Two Cities, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, Beowulf, Pride and Prejudice were the first ones that come to mind, though there are of course many more. Wish I knew more of the non-western classics

This is such a fascinating observation to me. Why has literature largely resisted team based creation? Writing teams exist for other mediums, but literature is almost exclusively written by a single creator who then loops others in after the work is completed.

A counterexample is The Expanse series [1]. Its author is listed as "James S. A. Corey", but that's actually a "pen name" for two people who work collaboratively [2]. But as you say, such examples are the exception.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_S._A._Corey

Seems like there are a good amount of two person writer teams though (in other mediums as well such as screenwriting). But teams of say 5 do not seem to be writing many novels.

Could be down to marketing - we like the idea of an "auteur" with a unique voice when we read a novel. Or it could be that having a consistent "voice" (or writing style I suppose) is a feature most people enjoy having in a novel.

I guess it depends on how you view this. Almost all books are edited by someone professionally. So it's not the sole work of the author. They are also published and marketed and yada yada. If you say okay all that stuff and even editing doesnt count you still have huge best sellers that are team based works.

All those book for sale at your grocery store? They sell massive copies and are not written by the author. Douglas Preston, John Grisham, Tom Clancy, and all those romance novels... A lot of those are written by someone AND someone else. In practice they are written by someone else and they slap a big name on it to sell copies. Those books keep the literature world running even if they are not great art.

Literature already is team based.

I'm pretty sure the only reason we don't recognize this, while we do with movies, is that there aren't rules governing who's credited and what their credit looks like, as there are with movies. You don't get "Story by X, written by A, B, & C, based on characters by Z", and instead one or maybe two names are on there—you do sometimes see a writer credit (separate from the more prominent "created by") on some of those long-running series where the original author stopped somewhere along the way, or two listed for outright collaborations between known authors.

If book writing operated under the same rules as screenwriting, this would all be a lot more visible.

You might be surprised about screenwriting - the rules are mainly just about the money. Script doctors could potentially be doing anything from some minor rearrangements to whole rewrites. A lot depends on how much they care that their name is or is not on the piece.

That makes sense. You see people thanked in books but its pretty rare to see any specifics other than an editor or publisher.

> Literature already is team based.

Don't forget editors. Maybe in some cases their impact is limited, but in other cases whole story lines are excised thanks to them. That's basically their job: to smoothen the narrative.

Most written works probably would look very different if not for the editor.

It might be profit margins. TV writers make more, and have writing teams. Book authors make less, so maybe it’s hard to split that and still live off of it.

And they do already split some of the work for the text with people like editors.

The RAM of a collaborative group can't store a whole story very well. Even a single author has trouble keeping all of the loose ends tied together, but when you have to traipse over everything in a conversation at <39 bits per second, it's very hard.

There is another example of this effect: mathematical proofs typically have just a few contributors, and very often one. But mathematics has an overall consistency that allows different people's proofs to be simply glued together at the "edges", unlike literature where that doesn't work at all.

The writing for shows is team based. Its just not this way for lit. I think it's just a cultural habitual thing. No real logic behind why.

Japan still uses fax machines. No logical reasoning behind why.

>The writing for shows is team based.

Your typical TV show has more plot holes than cheesecloth, though. That doesn't seem like a fair comparison.

I think it's fair. Lit has tons of plot holes. It's just not talked about as much and less noticeable. Harry potter, for example, has tons of plot holes.

When things cost money to produce, funders get more input. That said many TV and film projects are the vision of a single auteur, when the auteur has the pull to get total creative control from funders or else funds his own project. It’s just that this person is a director or executive producer instead of a writer.

As others have said, it's more of a crediting thing than the actuality.

Brandon Sanderson, a modern fantasy author, is famous for having an entire corporation of editors, storyboarders, and researchers. But only his name goes on the book.

I've studied Shakespeare a fair bit, his plays were certainly not written truly solo. But as the lead creative, alongside with humanity's love of hero worship, only his name stood the test of time.

The most efficient way known to share the idea for a story between two minds is to write the story, which obviates the need for collaboration.

I think this is how software development should be done as well. Software, like literature, requires one to hold all the context in order to avoid contradictions and to get things to fit together.

I think in most cases the best software is made by one or two individuals rather than large teams.

And don't even get me started on how much faster it is. Scrum is the mind-killer.

In software, as in writing, you have editors which request changes during the review process. Nowadays one person can't hold the whole program in his head. Some people lack soft-skills and so they pursue the myth of the solo developer.

The list is massive. It probably covers most open source projects from Linux (which might not be single personal now but it certainly was when it started) and git, cURL (still single person AFAIK) etc. even GNU started out as a single person project.

> cURL (still single person AFAIK)

That person is Daniel Stenberg. He's been the main driver[0] (esp since its been called "curl"), and is still the majority committer, but the project has ~1000[1][2] commit authors (disclosure, I'm one). I'm in no way trying to diminish Daniel's work. It is excellent. Curl has however taken on a life of its own to an extent, with a few other heavy lifters and lots of occasional contributers. I actually think this speaks well to Daniels leadership; he seems to have a loose grip that guides the project and keeps things on the rails with minimal perturbation. He's still a heavy lifter, but not entirely Atlas[3].

[0] https://curl.se/docs/governance.html

[1] https://curl.se/docs/thanks.html

[2] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/01/30/1000-commit-authors/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(mythology)

SQLite by D. Richard Hipp

Underrated answer

Tech stuff? This japanese developer that has been regularly updating his stuff for years and years. Simple. Efficient. Runs on anything. Although not super well known:

https://shirouzu.jp/

Non tech stuff? The standard design nail clipper is something probably most of take for granted. Invented by David Gestetner and used all over the world. I feel like this is the kind of thing that people might end up missing in a real dystopian mad max style world (assuming they become hard to come by). If I have to use a toe knife like the great Frank Reynolds I will not be pleased.

You really need both a knife and a spoon for complete toenail maintenance

Completely lost after reading this.

I'd put emacs and gcc by Richard Stallman on the list. (Obviously they subsequently grew to way more than one persons efforts.)

and GPL license

The Emacs you know today was written by James Gosling (of Java fame), which had its copyright and license headers stripped off and the GPL slapped on it with Stallman's name added. Gosling had quite a bit of help from others, as was the habit in the Emacs Commune.

To this day, Gosling is a little perturbed, from what I know. Stallman hasn't made major contributions to the project in well over a decade, and basically anything high level makes him confused. [0]

GCC has a long and storied history, and most of the code written by Stallman originally has been replaced with something better. Similarly, I don't believe he hasn't made major technical contributions in at least 20 years or so.

[0] https://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html

ColorFORTH deserves a mention, to say the least!

Chuck Moore devising his own programming language, which runs bare metal on x86 chips, in which he wrote a VLSI design program, to make chips, which run his programming language: it's safe to say this is the most control over a computing stack which a single human has at this moment in history.

Which is not to say GreenArrays is a one-man show, or detract from the hard work everyone else involved has done. I've not spoken to every one of them, but I can't imagine those I have disagreeing with me.

Forth itself is far more amazing considering the time period it was made. Chuck created self hosting OS's on KiB of ram, allowing an iterative development cycle when most OS's ran on computers the size of a refrigerator

Forth, and Chuck, and SVFIG, have all had a profound effect on my journey as a programmer. I strongly recommend A Problem-Oriented Language to anyone seeking a better understanding of the history and philosophy of computer programming.

Wasn’t lichess developed by one person? I’m not sure how old it is but I think it “withstands the test of time” since there are few (maybe no) other places on the internet so zealously and universally beloved by users.

It has a lot of contributors nowadays, but Thibault made the original site on his own.

https://github.com/lichess-org/lila/graphs/contributors

The lines blur between creation/discovery for some of these. Additionally, the historic nature makes it impossible to determine if these were all the work of a single individual, but I'll go with:

Joseph Shivers - Lycra/Spandex

Albert Hoffman - LSD

Anton Köllisch - MDMA (was killed in WW1)

John Pemberton - Coca Cola (significantly different to the modern drink)

John Baird Glen - Propofol

Percy Spencer - Microwave Oven

I'd wonder what the original Coca Cola would taste like.

Cocaine

Modern Coca-Cola is still flavored with coca leaves. Coca-Cola still imports the leaves and they are processed by a pharmaceutical company to extract the cocaine.

Tounge-numbing sensation

This is an interesting list because it gestures toward the fact that basically any first synthesis of a compound not found in nature appears to meet the poster's criterion.

It's vanishingly uncommon for a first synthesis to have been undertaken by a true team, although this can get murky recently with drug discovery software narrowing search space. Nevertheless there is always a moment when (barring alien civilization) the compound never existed, then it does: it is nearly always one person doing the chemistry, with (at most) assistants who are fully supervised extensions of his or her will.

Aspirin, for only one example, is the creation of Charles Frédéric Gerhardt.

John Wesley Hyatt - Plastic

The guy was trying to make ivory-free pool balls and discovered something that changed the future.

>The guy was trying to make ivory-free pool balls and discovered something that changed the future.

For the better or for worse?

Given we can make certain plastics from renewable resources, recycle them, or even compost them, I'd lean better, but I also think we're on a trajectory to people preferring 'micro-plastic free' diets.

A story about the value of synthetic polymers. When I visited the North Korean border circa 2004 the reverence with which the North Koreans treated plastic opened my eyes to its utility. Because they have no plumbing, the North Koreans at the border are considered "wealthy" because they can obtain discarded plastic containers that float across the river from China and allow them to easily haul water. The alternative is pottery, which is highly inefficient. It goes without saying that they had no metal. Another great thing: plastic lenses. Much lighter and cheaper than glass. Good enough for many uses. An Australian invention, like wifi. We are moving away from single-use plastics: someone needs sanction the consumer packaged goods industry.

My sites https://nomadlist.com and https://remoteok.com are single person creations. And exist about 8 and 7 years now! :)

I remember you posting years back (5+) about Nomadlist :) Still use it to this day.

TeX, the typesetting system developed by Donald Knuth

and his computer science bible: TAOCP!

well, it's not finished yet

Software is a pretty incredible industry because it allows a single person (or small group) to be responsible for something that so many systems are dependent on. Pretty incredible. Look at any modern package manager and see how many packages there are that enable massive businesses and operations that are written by one person and maybe a few contributions here and there.

It's a humbling experience to see people like that.

Total Commander - https://www.ghisler.com/

Been around for 27 years now and maintained by Christian Ghisler pretty much on his own.

For gaming the work of Chris Sawyer on Rollercoaster Tycoon is pretty interesting - entirely coded by him in Assembly. As far as I remember all of the art was also done by one guy (not Mr Sawyer). Extremely optimized programming.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/rollercoaster-tycoon/code-chris-saw...

Tarsnap - https://www.tarsnap.com/

(I cannot recommend this service enough.)

It's insanely expensive

If you are using it to back up data that is not easily compressible then yes, it can be.

The original Linux kernel was entirely Linus Torvald's work. Also the same applies for Git. GNU Emacs was Richard Stallman entirely. Most Linux tools we use e.g. cURL, wget etc, started out as one person effort for a very long time until they caught attention.

Another way to look at it: all the tools you use now are team efforts after a lone developer perfected it to a usable release, where people were largely impressed to pick it up further.

RMS did emacs, gcc, gdb, early libc, and probably the first versions of many of the GNU utilities. And, most importantly, the GPL.

I’m surprised Craigslist isn’t on the upper end of the comments section. It changed the way people bought things, even expensive things like cars, found jobs, dating…etc.

I always assumed Craigslist has a team behind it however even if it was created by just one guy?

Fiddler...now owned by Telerik. Creator Erik Lawrence. Wikipedia link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddler_(software)#:~:text=Fid....

Zombocom. Anything is possible at Zombocom

Coral Castle outside of miami, one weird man's project. https://coralcastle.com/

Similarly, Bishop’s Castle in Colorado

Also Moussa Castle in Lebanon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moussa_Castle

The Watts Towers in LA https://www.latimes.com/travel/story/2021-12-24/how-the-watt...

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladonia_(micronation)#/media/F...

If guns are your thing - probably most things by John Browning. His designs are basically still in use more than 100 years later.

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

Radio engineer and ham Grote Reber [1] independently pioneered radio astronomy back in the late 1930s by building a dish in his back yard in Illinois.[2] (Noone else who knew about Jansky's results followed up.) Tech in that day wasn't up to working at 3.3GHz, so he moved down to 910MHz then 157MHz. In 1939 he discovered Cygnus-A. In 1954 he moved to Tasmania to get away from man-made interference!

[1][https://public.nrao.edu/news/grote-reber-radio-astronomy-pio...] [2][https://web.archive.org/web/20060927053750/https://www.bigea...] (by John Kraus who ran Ohio's "Big Ear" operation)

"Edwin Hubble and Grote Reber — could there be more than a cosmic connection between them, both being astronomers, one optical and the other radio? Yes, it turns out, there is.

Around 1900 the Hubble family lived in Wheaton, Illinois, and as his 7th and 8th grade teacher young Edwin Hubble had a Miss Harriet Grote who later married Schuyler Reber and bore him Grote Reber as their first son. She often commented to Grote that young Edwin Hubble stood out from other students in his class and that she felt he would go far. In later years, when Hubble's fame was spreading she took special pride in his accomplishments and that she had been his teacher."

WOW

I think of this comic which was done completely by Jack Kirby

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMAC_(Buddy_Blank)

which has some delicious irony since it is about a "One Man Army Corps".

Kirby worked with Stan Lee and some others at Marvel comics to develop the characters and settings that set the foundation for Marvel being... Marvel. Kirby was kinda resentful that Stan Lee hogged the credits for the work. Particularly Stan Lee had a writing credit for all of the books he was involved in, but "writing" includes both planning the scenario and choosing individual words and the illustrators had a lot of input into the scenario.

Looking at OMAC you see Kirby do a really heroic job. The scenario planning is excellent and the writing at the sentence level is fine, but you can see that Lee had a special touch for that which Kirby didn't have.

https://www.comics.org/issue/27707/

Script:Jack Kirby

Pencils:Jack Kirby

Inks:Mike Royer

Colors:Jerry Serpe

Letters:Mike Royer

Serpe colored the whole comic’s run. In issue 2, D. Bruce Berry took over the inks; in 3 he took over the letters as well. This continued until the final issue (8), which was inked and lettered by Royer. And the final panel was “rewritten and redrawn by someone other than Kirby” due to the series being cancelled.

I have seen a lot of Kirby’s pencils (even inked over one of his pages as an exercise) and most of the comic is there in them, but there is a huge difference between them and an inked/colored/lettered page.

The Theremin and early Moog synthesizers by Bob Moog.

SID (the sound chip of the Commodore 64) by Bob Yannes.

Reminded me of another:

John Chowning - FM Synthesis

PuTTY - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PuTTY

The first thing that came to mind was the Roud Folk Song Index, a database of 250,000 songs all researched and compiled by a former librarian in the 70s, as a labor of love (and scholarly dedication, I guess).

And then Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, a dictionary researched and written by a single man. He thought it would take three years, ended up taking nine years. All the more impressive for the reckless confidence paid off by diligence.

The famous anecdote Boswell reported about Dr. Johnson's confidence in his own abilities as a scholar:

>ADAMS: But the French Academy, which consists of forty members, took forty years to compile their Dictionary.

>JOHNSON: Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.

Not to take away from Johnson's accomplishment with his Dictionary but he did have a half-dozen staff.

https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2009/septemberoctober/feature...

I think the quote you're citing is this, right?

> And Johnson did not write his dictionary alone: He had half a dozen assistants, and the history of lexicography tells us that assistants influence dictionary-making more than either eighteenth-century social hierarchies or the Great Author theory behind Johnson’s reputation admits.

My understanding was that the work of the assistants was to copy down quotations Johnson had researched. I imagine they did other things too, but did they write the dictionary, or did they write down the dictionary? If there's a serious claim that they had input on the content, then that's one thing, otherwise I'll continue hewing to my unreconstructed Great Author narrative :)

I had also thought of Shakespeare when this question was asked, but then thought "well, I'm fairly certain he wrote the plays mostly by himself, but I'm also fairly sure other people, unattributed, committed a line here or there, and his actors probably made contributions that found their way into the folio editions, and so on, so maybe that's not a good answer to this question." I think Johnson, being as much an arrogant misanthrope as he was a titanic scholar, was probably less collaborative than Shakespeare in many ways, including his work on the Dictionary.

Banished

https://shiningrocksoftware.com/

One person made an outstanding village-building game that has not only stood the test of time (released 8 years ago) but also spawned dozens of imitators and a robust modding community. It's sold at least 2 million copies (based on outdated info I could find) and is frequently referenced in gaming media with the reverence of a classic.

Dust: An Elysian Tail - a metroidvania game

"Aside from voice acting, soundtrack, and parts of the story, Dust was designed and programmed entirely by Dodrill. A self-taught illustrator and animator, he had previously done artwork and cinematics on Epic Games' Jazz Jackrabbit 2, and was in the process of creating an independent animated film, Elysian Tail.[14] He assumed it would take three months to complete the game; it actually took over three-and-a-half years. He originally envisioned the game as an 8-bit-style platformer, similar to earlier entries in the Castlevania series. Inspirations for the final game came from such titles as Metroid, Golden Axe, and Ys I & II, which Dodrill cites as his favorite games."

Javascript (created by Brendan Eich in 10 days)

Using Common Lisp.

I would love some references on this, as it's the first I've heard of it! I know Brendan Eich was hired to embed Scheme in Navigator, and always presumed that he whipped up the Java-flavored prototype language we all know and, have feelings about, by using Scheme in both senses: that is, as the VM/semantic basis and as the development language.

So, I can't for the life of me find any references while I'm pretty sure in the past having read what I claimed.

Maybe this helps?: https://twitter.com/aerique/status/1498684767696523271

https://twitter.com/brendaneich/status/1498718012597170181?s...

Thanks again.

Apologies for the initial claim.

Cave Story, great unique platformer made by one person that accumulated a large community and ended up being put on various consoles

That was an excellent game.

This was the first thing that came to mind. Still blows me away how amazing the art, music, gameplay, everything is. He even wrote some of the tools he used to make the game, like pxtone which he used for the music.

SpinRite - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite

Everything[0], instant NTFS file search on Windows. The thing keeping me from using Linux on my main home PC.

[0] https://www.voidtools.com/

That's the only thing? `find / -iname "hello"` doesn't do it for ya?

No, find is slow.

Locate, sure.

Both speed and GUI matters (to me). ANGRYsearch and FSearch come closest on Linux, but they're still far off and the upcoming Everything 1.5 (in alpha) widens the gap.

Author of FSearch here, is there anything in particular you're missing? But yes, there's a huge gap and it's probably never going away. There are many reasons for that. For one, Everything has been in development for quite some time now, and some things just can't be done on Linux. For example there's no MFT on Linux we could parse to quickly get a list of all files or an USN journal to keep track of modified files, hence building and maintaining the database will always be slower.

Not only, but single biggest. find won't do, but I'd be happy if either ANGRYsearch or FSearch one day reached feature parity with Everything.

Seen the locate command in Linux?

What about works of art in general ? Leonardo da Vinci, Van Gogh, Picasso, Escher, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, Haendel, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Saint-Saëns, Bob Dylan, Mark Knopfler, Bob Marley ... And so forth. All artists who created works that are still considered masterpieces to this day.

I'm consistently impressed by the stuff I wrote using the golang standard lib still running an entire decade later with only golang stdlib updates, while the stuff written with dependencies is dead

SSH - originally written by one person - Tatu Ylönen.

Rock garden in Chandigarh, India.

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

- PuTTY (Simon Tatham) - Bitcoin (Satoshi Nakamoto, if he's a single person) - mIRC (Khaled Mardam-Bey)

Gambit Scheme [1]. Marc started it 34 years ago and still is going strong. Recent versions has support for generating js/php/python/ruby code, but I'm not sure what the current state is. One of the most portable and optimizing scheme compilers around.

newLISP [2] is still maintained and Lutz is frequent on forum.

Kawa Scheme [3], very good optimizing scheme on JVM, started 24 years ago. Per Bothner, author, is frequent on forum, although he'd like someone to continue developing it.

PicoLisp [4], started 34 years ago. Alexander Burger is still maintaining it, latest version was 2 months ago.

LFE [5], started by Robert Virding (one of Erlang authors), 14 years ago. Still developed.

Calibre [6], started 15 years ago by Kovid Goyal. Still in heavy development by Kovid.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambit_(Scheme_implementation)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewLISP

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kawa_(Scheme_implementation)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PicoLisp

[5] https://lfe.io/

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibre_(software)

Hacker News, including Arc.

Not entirely on topic here but the first thing I thought of: Years after his music program called Impulse Tracker had had it's heyday, some music magazine did a roundup of various resampling algorithms and Jeffrey Lim's resampling algorithm was included for posterity and to round things out so that it wasn't all only big-money players. Names like Kurzweil, Alesis, Akai, Roland, Yamaha, Sony, Pioneer, Philips, Tascam ... but there on that list at NUMBER ONE was the resampling algorithm from a little shareware program made by a hobbyist for making beep boop techno.

(For those interested in the technical aspects of how to compare resampling algorithms, you take a sound, graph it, speed it up then slow it down, graph it again. Comparison of the two graphs would ideally be identical but in practice that's nearly impossible. Mainly you're looking for where frequencies got created that were not originally there.)

APL by Ken Iverson, as well as its descendants.

How about https://oeis.org/ the Online Encyclopaedia of Integer Sequences? It seems to have been run by Neil Sloane for maybe 40 years alone before getting a board of associate editors and volunteers, but it's not clear with a quick search exactly how long or how alone. He does seem to have been the primary guiding force for its 58 years, even with help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-Line_Encyclopedia_of_Intege...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numb...

Bill Joy made ex, vi, C shell and much of early BSD. All of those (at least if VIM usage counts as using vi, which counts as using ex) are still getting a lot of use.

General relativity, they haven't found a dent in it yet.

Quantum mechanics certainly provides a dent as it were.

There are some who claim there is evidence that "Albert Einstein" is really a shortcut/brand name for the husband-and-wife team comprising Albert and his first wife Mileva Maric; I read somewhere that they decided to put only his name on the papers to make it more likely that he may get a permanent job. His wife and fellow student certainly was intellectually involved, and Albert wrote to his wife once: "How happy I am to have found in you an equal creature". She was smart yet failed her final exams. (He left her for his own cousin.)

General relativity was not produced in isolation, there were a number of other big names in mathematics and physics at the time trying to find a relativistic theory of gravitation. Einstein will have been discussing with the other physicists and been familiar with their work.

See for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordstr%C3%B6m%27s_theory_of...

In that sense, the vast majority of inventions aren't original or created in a vacuum, we all build on the top of giants.

Intermittent windshield wipers. Fantastically useful and co-opted by everybody who could (legally or not).

So, this guy owns the house next to a good friend of mine in Auburn California.

It is a vacation home of sorts - but its a very large nice house ~7,000+ SF very well kept grounds - but rarely seen there.

Postfix

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postfix_(software)

Seems initially the work of a single person, though I have no doubt others contributed greatly also.

Curl

Surprised nobody has said Denis Ritchie and C.

Also, the architecture of Corbosier. Lots of other examples exist in architecture.

Great question, by the way.

Your comment made me think of Hundertwasser's architecture: https://www.hundertwasser.com/en/architecture , another example.

Very much the opposite of Corbosieur, but still great and a really interesting exploration of similar ideas.

Anki, the very popular Spaced Repetition System is developped and maintained by one person if I'm correct.

Chris Latner's LLVM compiler. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM

Literature. Pretty much all of the greatest stories ever told came from the mind of one person.

PGP

Phil Zimmerman

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

Perl. Originally a single person creation. All credits to all the hard work people have put in over the years to maintain it.

Although more recently the technology has fallen into obscurity, flintknapping has for millions of years stood the test of time, far longer than anything yet mentioned here, and whether we're aware of it or not, we all owe considerably to whomever came up with it, along with the inventor of the wheel, as well as whomever developed the ancient and mysterious techniques to control, use and even create fire, not to mention, of course, whatever unknowable creative geniuses that invented throwing, food, sex, clothes, pockets, wiping the nose, wiping other things, etc. Come to think of it, there was likely a first individual that came up with adding and others for each operator, and these inventions must have occurred a very long time ago yet many still use calculation even today.

ffmpeg and qemu

Both by Fabrice Bellard, whose website:

https://bellard.org/

is a list of projects where any one item - even the small ones, much less ffmpeg and qemu - would be at the top of anyone else's resume....quite impressive!

A counter to the myth of the 10x developer

Yeah, my very first thought on seeing the question was, "Anything by Fabrice Bellard":)

The Q says, "entire core of it was developed and maintained by a single person"

which does not describe ffmpeg. FB was pretty active for first 4-5 years, but he wasn't the sole dev even then.

Unsounded is a phenomenally nuanced and gorgeous webcomic created by a solo writer/artist. It's the only active webcomic I follow. http://www.casualvillain.com/Unsounded/

If you like this, you may also like: order of the stick

Ooh, thank you for the recommendation!

TAOCP by Donald Knuth

What do you mean by test of time?

Is this applicable to Minecraft if there is Michelangelos David, or Beethovens 5th Symphony?

Or some random tech stuff like Git if all the math is run on the shoulders of the likes of Euklid?

But to add something technical:

Nicolas Appert the guy who did canning before Pasteur could explain how it worked.

It applies to everything you mentioned. I didn't ask anyone to compare the relative greatness of the creations.

I think he's saying one is years old, the other is centuries old.

Exactly.

Maybe Minecraft will be gone in 5 years because Microsoft releases a Minecraft 2.

Then it will not have stood the test of time. while the Mona Lisa and canned food is still there.

Forgive the tangent, but this is the first time I've seen Euclid written with a "k".

In retrospect that seems like the more obvious Latinization. I wonder why Euclid is more common.

I suspect the clue is in your phrasing: Latinization. European scholars wrote in Latin, where "k" is uncommon and "kl" almost unknown, and transliterated Εὐκλείδης as "Euclidis". Later writers in French and English - but probably not in Germanic languages other than English - turned this into "Euclid".

If the Elements was discovered now, we'd probably favour a more direct transliteration of the Greek: Eukleidos.

Well i did not think about it, the name is written with k in Germany.

The Germans keep a lot of the Greek K in names where in general the latinized version with an C is used by others.

Isn't Minecraft the David or 5th Symphony of our time?

Dwarf Fortress is one person right?

Wikipedia gives it as a two-person creation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_Fortress#History

The World Wide Web comes to mind.

John Sinclair (not the poet) is both the name of a German pulp horror series as well as of its main character. New books appear every week, and although initially some of them were written by others, the whole series is mainly the creation of a single author, Jason Dark. Because of his age, the series is now written by a team of authors with Dark only contributing one novel per months roughly.

The series has been published continuously since the 1970s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sinclair_(German_fiction)

Photopea is an online photo editing tool created by a single person. https://www.failory.com/interview/photopea

Multiple monograph examples come to mind, from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, to Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Alexander's A Pattern Language, and many others.

Photopea - Free Adobe Photoshop alternative.

this is an interesting topic -- I find it socially curious how some academic coders can have their name at the top of a project, as if it was solo, and then a dozen+ names listed in the "thank you" section.. as an academic outsider, I can say that there are definitely layers to the academic social norms world, where both well-spoken industrious visionary individuals, and harsh thankless abusive team leaders, can end up with "sole inventor" looking attributes even though in fact, no one does that much detailed work completely alone.

Liquid Paper[0]

It may be on its way out, now.

[0] https://www.thoughtco.com/liquid-paper-bette-nesmith-graham-...

Most of the time I've seen people using Wite-Out, they're using the tape version because you don't have to wait for it to dry

HTOP (Hisham Muhammad)

PCem (Sarah Walker)

Probably not what you had in mind, but the first thing that popped into my mind after reading the subtitle of your post was Venus of Dolni Vestonice, a little ceramic figurine of a woman dated to 29,000–25,000 BCE. Beautiful piece of art in my opinion (although beauty standards have changed).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Doln%C3%AD_V%C4%9Bsto...

That looks like a pretty accurate representation of an elderly multigravida. Given the likelihood that it’s a fertility charm of some sort, it’s not really indicating anything about changing beauty standards. I imagine if it is a charm that indicating surviving multiple pregnancies was part of the significance.

Like MS-DOS? I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Paterson

Redis

Linux

This was a single person creation once but it grew so much bigger than that.

Also as a single-person creation, Linux is basically the implementation of an API which existed before -- not only did this bypass a huge amount of work that would go into designing a fundamentally new operating system, but it meant Linus's work would be useful because lots of existing software would run on it.

(I find it depressing that real innovation in operating systems seems impossible because everybody wants to run old software... Thus all the "bloat" has to get put back into the system.)

Richard Stallman would be very upset if he saw this comment

GNU contributed, but if they didn't exist Linux would either grow its own userspace or possibly borrow from *BSD. In the meantime, Linux did what GNU for some reason couldn't... although today HURD is actually nearly usable (in a VM) and Linux doesn't need GNU components (Alpine proves that musl/busybox can cover userspace, and with clang AFAIK you can make a completely GNU-free self-hosting system), which makes the whole thing a bit funnier to reason about.

I'd vote for Éric Chahi's Another World/Out of this world, Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia and maybe Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon.

My jQuery Termial: https://terminal.jcubic.pl/ library. It started more the 10 years ago. It's written in ES5, I didn't wanted to do that, but I'm thinking about creating version 3.0 that would be a rewrite in latest JavaScript or TypeScript.

Richard Stallman: Gnu Emacs, GCC, GNU Debugger, GNU make.

They all started as one man projects. Then others started to contribute little, then more.

The original make was also a one-person project, it was created by Stuart Feldman

There is that guy in India who dug a route through mountains.

There is another guy who is building a castle using mostly meieval methods.

1st guy is Dashrath Manjhi.

Another World/Out of this world was single-handedly built by Eric Chahi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_World_(video_game). And ported to various systems. Unbelievable.

Oh Alan Adler comes in twice! He's credited for inventing the Aeropress coffee brewer and the Aerobie frisbees!

I'm shocked that noone mentioned Kent Beck and JUnit. JUnit is one of the most widely-used libraries out there.

John Resig's Jquery

Written laws - Hammurabi

Nocash set of emulators and debuggers[1], created by Martin Korth some decades ago and they'are still widely used as a decent debugger, specially when developing gb/gba software.

1: https://problemkaputt.github.io/

Finnegan's Wake.

RT-11 (a real-time, largely foreground/background operating system for the PDP-11)

I have heard that the RT-11 OS was a one man effort at DEC, which for many years was more popular than Unix on the PDP-11, but I don't know the details. Do any DEC experts know more about this?

Wordle

Transport Tycoon (Now OpenTTD) - a simulation game where you build a transportation company with complex economics, physics and other real world elements built in. If I am not this game was written by Chris Sawyer in early 90's or late 80's.

The guy is a legend.

This was probably done by just one crazy obsessive, and will likely be around for quite some time:

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

But the Wiki article says that it was built by a company.

Schrödinger's cat. Oh, wait. Maybe it didn't survive.

More seriously, 1) some mathematical fields, e.g. Galois groups. 2) some specific game strategies: - Bridge has the Stayman Convention (and others) - Chess has Alekhine's Defense (and others)

I’ve never hired any other developed to work on https://pollylingu.al with me, but obviously there other who work as tutors and translators

Mojang was formed relatively early on in the development of Minecraft and had a small team (and outsourced dev for other platforms) for quite a lot of it's development and obviously now is a behemoth.

Minecraft was pretty damn polished before it ever released, though. He formed Mojang pretty early, but if I recall, there were no employees other than Notch for a long while.

Talking about when it was in beta and the only way to play it was in the browser.

The Minecraft Alpha was released in June 2010 and Mojang was setup a few months later in September. A little more than a year after the first public release. There were four other people from the beginning with a few more people joining as development to release progressed over the next year. At least as I understand things.

Then between 2011 and 2014 when it was sold to MS there were a lot more employees, development and outsourcing which is arguably when it exploded.

Wasn’t the JS release done specifically for the tenth anniversary?

Lululemon founder Chip Wilson was the inventor of Board Shorts (the shorts for surfers... he then went on to invent several other garments - then founded lululemon...

His episode on how I built this is REALLY interesting.

Yeah, but did you ever see this interview in the Vancouver magazine the Tyee about how he named the company lululemon so he could hear japanese women pronounce it 'rururemon'?

Yeah he's an egotistical douche, but that tends to be normal in such businessmen...

If you are not talking about only tech project creations, then certainly many of the great books might fall under this category, especially those which birthed new mindsets as part of their creation.

Such as?

Kenshi[0] is a great example

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenshi_(video_game)

The Turing machine appears to still be in use.

The web has done alright.

There are hundreds of them.

Remind - https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/

Renderdoc is built and maintained by one guy. https://renderdoc.org/

Craigslist started as a mailing list managed by Craig.

Chopin nocturnes. https://youtu.be/wuL7UC2glJM

https://pinboard.in/ run and built by a single guy

NGINX

Rubik's Cube

I launched romylms.com and testedrecruits.com five years ago and have been running them at a steady state since.

https://soldat.pl/en/

Python and Ruby

and Perl for that matter

There are a large number of prolific inventors whose technology we still use today in some form or another: There's a lovely little book "Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time" about Harrison's marine chronometer.

Others like Gutenberg's printing press, Franklin's lightning rod, Whitney's cotton gin, Jenner's smallpox vaccine, Nobel's dynamite, Edison's phonograph, etc. etc. etc. are available in lots of lists.

Probably everything Nikola Tesla did !

Bit late to this party, but Have I Been Pwned by Troy Hunt is a single person venture I believe.

Rsync -- Initial release 25 years ago

Most great artistic works are the creation of a single human: Shakespeare, Mozart, Da Vinci, etc.

In one sense, yes. In another, though, most great artistic works draw inspiration from other earlier works, and so are arguably not a "creation" by a single human; more like an evolution, a synthesis, a derivation, a continuation...

Would Shakespeare have written Romeo and Juliet if there hadn't previously been Pyramus and Thisbe, or many other sources?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_and_Juliet#Sources

I built the website builder N.nu myself in 2009. Still popular in Sweden today, 13 years later.

The paperclip? That seemed to be multiple 'single person' inventors, however.

Are you talking about Clippy? ;-)

VLC

As you named a game Stardew Valley was my first idea.

But a lot of essential tech tools, apps and libraries, are mostly one man creation (fitting in https://xkcd.com/2347/).

I think that calibre, keepassx (no longer maintained, but living as keepassxc) and curl are some examples.

Excellent thread, thanks! Elasticsearch fits the criteria, I think.

IMAP by Mark Crispin

Not a lot of people realise that Windows 1 through to Windows XP was written by Bill Gates alone from his bedroom. Wasn't until Longhorn that he brought in Steve Ballmer to help out.

zlib by Mark Adler

Project page at https://zlib.net/

All math? Almost all science? Almost all art?

emacs, a lot of art including books, film, wheel, fire, some programming languages (C, Perl, Python)

Photopea - Free Photoshop Alternative

Michelangelo's David :)

curl

Unturned

General relativity

Newtonian mechanics

The pythagorean theorem

(Am I cheating?)

If you want to cheat, might as well include religion and religionesque views (Confucius). Plenty of those claim to originate from 1 person.

Tim Paterson's DOS?

I believe ImageMagick[0] fits the criteria.

There's even an XKCD[1] about it.

[0] https://imagemagick.org/ [1] https://m.xkcd.com/2347/

Does TempleOS count? I'm not sure it's been long enough but it's definitely unique.

I genuinely think it’s going to be an important teaching tool.

Sort of: this is the computer in its most raw and pure form, not for work but for play!

Bayesian statistics?

https://xkcd.com/

The Sistine Chapel?

SPICE layout tool?

The overhand knot?

Notepad++, PSPad.

7-Zip, LZ4, Zstd.

Christianity

Confucius

TeX

Bash.

pinboard

git comes to mind

leftpad

qr codes

The light-bulb - Thomas Edison

No. His research for a better filament was conducted by a large team.

I am forbidden from purchasing them now in a standard size.

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