Saturday, February 7, 2015

7 Excellent Software Programs Written By Solo Programmers!

Writing code for developing a software can be done by a person alone, if pair programming is not being performed. Though most of the developers work together in a team, sometimes programmers work on an application all alone. If the programmer is genius enough then he/she can create such an impressive code which is loved a lot by others too. Here are seven such software programs which are written by one person and are quite impressive too.




1. Fabrice Bellard’s JSLinux: 

If a person gets immense recognition as one of the greatest programmers in the world, then that person usually gets motivated to create something unique, just for fun. That's how QEMU hardware emulator developer Fabrice Bellard wrote JSLinux. It's a 32-bit x86 compatible CPU which runs on Linux and it has 32MB RAM. If a programmer is smart enough like Bellard, an excellent program like JSLinux can be written in 7,000 lines of code.

2. David Horne’s 1K ZX Chess: 

Chess programmer David Horne created a version of chess which fits in the 672 bytes available. Though the programme faced some initial struggles as the screen went blank each time the computer started its next move and the game faced problems. But still, being a solo programming initiative, it was definitely an achievement.

3. Olivier Poudade’s BootChess: 

David Horne’s 1K ZX Chess maintained its position as the smallest chess program for 32 consecutive years. Then the record was broken by French programmer Olivier Poudade when he created BootChess which fits in 487 bytes, instead of Horne's Chess' 672 bytes. Poudade took three months to write the program and created over 200 versions too. Some basic chess moves went missing from this program too. But whenever the world talks about miniature chess programs we mostly remember Poudade's achievement.

4. Daniel J. Bernstein’s qmail: 

qmail was created in 1995 and it was a secure alternative to SMTP mail transfer agent Sendmail. qmail is written in C and it's less complex than Sendmail. Bugs were very rare in qmail and it's still popular on Unix systems. The last major release of code took place in 1998.

5. Chris Sawyer’s RollerCoaster Tycoon: 

Assembly language was used in coding computer games at an earlier stage. Then programmer Chris Sawyer wrote RollerCoaster Tycoon and it changed the face of computer games as assembly language was no longer required.

6. Don Knuth’s TeX: 

The author of The Art of Computer Programming, Don Knuth, was not happy with the proofs of the second edition of the second volume of his book. That's when he decided to take control in his own hands and he designed a new digital typesetting system for technical publications. Knuth wrote the initial version of TeX and he used Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language (SAIL) for the same.

7. Richard Stallman’s GNU Emacs: 

One of the creators of the original EMACS text editor, Richard Stallman, wrote started working on GNU operating system in 1983 and was looking for a version of Emacs for his Unix-like system. He started programming a free version of Emacs for GNU, based on a proprietary version of Emacs for Unix, which was created by James Gosling. The Lisp interpreter was not a part of Gosling's Emacs and that was required by Stallman mostly. Stallman wrote a new version of Emacs using C all alone including a Lisp interpreter. GNU Emacs was first released in 1985 and has been ported to several operating systems.

Courtesy: IT World 

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