I once worked for a small gaming company. One of the lead programmers there was what could be called a "star" coder. A hacker. Not only had he implemented several dozen games in the company, but he was a regular in all kinds of video game "hackatons" (ie. competitions where small groups of developers create a video game in a day or two), and was quite famous not only among those circles but among other indie gaming companies here as well. Needless to say everybody in the company considered him not only a stellar coder, but outright crucial to the survival of the company.
There's a saying that goes like "never meet your heroes", which means that when you admire a celebrity or someone you don't personally know, if you ever were to get to actually know that person it may well reveal personality or other flaws that greatly mar your admiration.
In this case the saying could be adapted as "never look at the star programmer's code".
There are admired stellar programmers who genuinely write extremely good well-written code, who know what they are doing, who have an extremely good understanding of algorithms and programming techniques, both from the theoretical and the practical point of view.
Then there are "stellar" programmers who... let's say, only give the appearance of being so. They might be very prolific and produce impressive-looking results, but if you delve into what they have written and what their actual knowledge is, it might be less than impressive.
You see, even though we worked for the same company, we were doing completely separate projects and never worked on the same project, so I never got to see his code. With the exception of one time, where I briefly participated in the development of one particular game.
Turned out that this "stellar" programmer with his impressive resume... wasn't one of the best programmers I have ever met. Sure, he could write code, and he knew the programming languages he was using, but I quickly noticed how poor his understanding of many programming related concepts and algorithms was.
As an example, in that project there was a need for a random number generator and because of the programming language only floating point numbers were available. He had implemented an extremely poor-quality Lehmer RNG. When I checked what the period of the generator was, it was in the thousands. I'm not kidding. His RNG went through a few thousands of values before it started repeating.
When I mentioned this to him, he had no idea what I was talking about. He had literally no understanding of even the basics of random number generation, and had never even thought about things like the period of an RNG. He had never tested what the period of his RNG was, or in any way checked its quality. He was lucky that it just happened to not give egregiously obvious poor quality to the player of the game.
I suggested I implement a slightly better 32-bit LCG. While the quality of LCGs is also not brilliant, at least the period could be pumped from the few thousands to over 4 billion (and the quality can be somewhat improved by mixing up the higher bits with the lower bits.) However, to implement this 32-bit LCG when 32-bit floating points are the only numerical data type available required a bit of ingenuity.
Ingenuity that, as it turns out, he absolutely did not have. Not only did he have no idea what an LCG was, he had no ideas whatsoever about how to implement 32-bit integer arithmetic using 32-bit floats. When I explained to him how to do 32-bit multiplication using 16-bit integers (as floats can be used to handle 16-bit integers just fine) using the classical long multiplication algorithm, he had no idea what I was talking about.
This guy, who had gone to school as normal, had no idea how long multiplication works. And apparently wasn't even very interested when I tried to explain it to him. I don't know which was more appalling, his lack of knowledge, or his lack of interest.
Yeah. Never meet your heroes, nor read their code.
