Personally, I think it is a toss up between John Carmack and Elon Musk. Both of them are extremely impressive, their resumes speak for themselves.

Unless you have actually worked with the person you have no way to judge.

I'm not familiar with Elon Musk but as far as John Carmack goes, he's a regular hacker, he made a lot of money off some fairly uninspiring games because he came in early and ID has been seriously out of touch for quite some time. Obviously he is less involved these days, being more into rockets and what not but hey, if I had millions of dollars I might spend my time learning that sort of jazz too rather than working every hour god sends.

Also, what are you comparing? If you compare web development skills he's probably a complete novice.

There are hard working people and there is business acumen, combine these and make money. Great engineers are working in businesses up and down the country.

"Unless you have actually worked with the person you have no way to judge."

I know, this is not meant to be rigorous or particular precise, I'm just looking for opinions.

"as far as John Carmack goes, he's a regular hacker"

I disagree strongly with this statement. Carmack has been a pioneer in the field of real time graphics. His graphic engines have practically been the state of art for the last 20 years.

"Also, what are you comparing?"

Nothing in particular, just looking for opinions, like I said previously I'm not looking to be rigorous.

@RivieraKid

as far as John Carmack goes, he's a regular hacker, he made a lot of money off some fairly uninspiring games because he came in early and ID has been seriously out of touch for quite some time

Pro tip: you need to do your research before you say anything. If there was voting enabled in lounge posts you would be probably be down voted to oblivion. I don't mean to start flame war but just saying.

Both guys are geniuses in their departments, possibly irreplaceable.

Also, what are you comparing? If you compare web development skills he's probably a complete novice.

Who the hell compares how good of a programmer/engineer someone is by their web development skills? Seriously, it doesn't take much to become web developer.

Anyways, best living engineer huh? I would say something like John Carmack or Linus Torvalds. The latter one, programmed UNIX clone in machine code, that's pretty damn impressive. I think most of game programmers now are inspired by John Carmack, I saw few documentaries about his work, I was impressed to say the least.

I think "best" and "engineer" should be both defined before a meaningful discussion about the "best engineer".

Engineers are not often very famous people, so this is tough.
Who designed the bridge, the car or the elevator you take to work every day? Who came up with the combination of materials used to build your office? Who built the space station?
Very few engineers are widely known for their work... so the few "rock star" engineers who are famous are likely to be over-used as answers to this question.

Carmack has been a pioneer in the field of real time graphics. His graphic engines have practically been the state of art for the last 20 years.

It's a bit depressing to give all the credit to Carmack and ignore people like Michael Abrash in the process...
Q1 was/is legendary, but there were more engineers than just Carmack on the team.
That's not to say that Carmack isn't inspirational, but for every "rock star" programmer, there's surely a dozen being ignored.

As far as the state of the art is concerned though, the ID-tech engines (or even the Source engine which is a descendant of Quake 1) are nowhere near as dominant as they once were. I'd say ID peaked with Quake 3, with Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, etc, etc being developed on that engine... but in the later generations, hardly anyone uses ID-tech any more.
I read more publications, steal more ideas from, gain more inspiration from... other companies much more than from ID. It's not very accurate to call them an industry leader any more. TBH they've been pretty irrelevant for this past generation of games

Who the hell compares how good of a programmer/engineer someone is by their web development skills? Seriously, it doesn't take much to become web developer.

Yeah, because making systems that handle Exabytes of information and Billions of requests is child's play. I hear Google hires anyone who can write HTML and variables!

@RivieraKid

Quote




as far as John Carmack goes, he's a regular hacker, he made a lot of money off some fairly uninspiring games because he came in early and ID has been seriously out of touch for quite some time



Pro tip: you need to do your research before you say anything. If there was voting enabled in lounge posts you would be probably be down voted to oblivion. I don't mean to start flame war but just saying.



Both guys are geniuses in their departments, possibly irreplaceable.

Why irreplaceable? The algorithms that Carmack used he didn't really invent. They were already techniques that were widely known and understood in computer science. He just used them to make games with. BSPs were already around, Carmacks reverse shadowing was already patented by Creative before he reinvented it and the fast square root used in Quake was a wel known mathematical hack. John Carmack has also blogged several times himself about how he is more of a hacker and in his own words not a very good software engineer. Also as Hodgman rightly pointed out there were many other developers such as Abrash involved at iD software. Carmack is just the one that achieved Rock Star status partly because he was a founding member.
If you ever work at a large games company you will meet dozens of other developers who are absolute geniuses.

I'm not trying to purposely put Carmack down but, best living engineer? .. Not by a mile.

Don't forget there are engineers such as Jack Bresenham, Bjarne Stroustrup , Brian Kernighanm, Steve Wozniak and Tim Berners Lee and countless others still alive.

Car

Carmack has been a pioneer in the field of real time graphics

Carmack was a pioneer in the field of computer graphics. Not saying he isn't good, but it it weren't for guys like Jim Blinn, Edwin Catmull and many others, I doubt that we would be talking about Doom today.

Most coders know who Bjarne Stroustrup is (inventor of C++), but we wouldn't know Bjarne if it weren't for Dennis Ritchie(inventor of C), and most people don't know who Dennis is.

Best living engineer? Probably someone no one has ever heard about, and probably never will.

"Best engineer"...there are people that take a man to the moon and back alive, people who digitalized and secured currency, people who make 3G connections and GPS happen, people who are solving food crisis in Africa. How do you call anyone best without coming off stupidly narrow-minded? You don't.

I like to think every human being solves more or less complex problems by thinking, so there's a little engineer in all of us.