John Romero was making shareware games for years before he met John Carmack. He wrote the level editors, much gameplay code, created many levels for, and significantly contributed to the game design of all the id games from Commander Keen to Quake. His absence is arguably a big part of why most of the later id games just aren't as fun as Doom. Daikatana bombed for a lot of reasons (zero experience as a manager, dotcom-era ridiculousness in hype and project scope, infamously horrible marketing campaign that he had no part in, etc), but not because John Romero was an incompetent programmer or game designer.

If you have the time, watch this series in which John Romero and (Bioshock level designer and apparent Doom fanboy) Jean-Paul LeBreton play through the first episode of Doom and analyze its level design in depth:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygp4-kmjpzI

The piece is well written and informative. Lesser minds such as mine even consider it useful.

The content of the article is more or less evergreen. Raymond's celebrity in a constellation of small worlds [deserved or not] makes it more likely to get treated so.

The joke is funny. If Knuth and Ritchie we're the domain for panels one and two though, panel three would get a much larger range. John Skeet, even maybe?