I disagree with Aaron. I would reserve the title of the greatest programmer in the world to Fabrice Bellard. He single-handedly wrote QEMU, FFMPEG, an LTE base station, a PC emulator in javascript, and countless other projects. Alone.

http://bellard.org/

I admire Fabrice Bellard. I find amazing the amount of software that he has produced. Some of his creations are remarkable being one-man efforts eg. a compiler, an emacs clone, an emulator, etc.

I spent quite some months learning about editors and one of my evening distractions was to write a new UI backend for qemacs. I found the design clever, quite flexible, etc, but in no-way easy to read or elegant. (To be fair, it did not help that he added a video player and a WYSIWYG html editor to it).

Later I came to a Vim clone called vis (https://github.com/martanne/vis) and I found the source code more close to those programs where you think "It can't be made simpler".

I wish future programmers read more code before writing just like literature writers do. It should be part of the education system and I regret not having read "classics" before starting writing.