Ask HN: How are some people exceptionally productive?
Never heard of the two people you mention, but I'll share what I've observed:<p>The two biggest time sinks in everyday programming are 1.) communicating with everyone else and 2.) looking things up.  If you can avoid these and have a quick analytical mind, you can basically program as quickly as you can type.  So the secret to being insanely productive is to work as a solo programmer in a domain where you are <i>thoroughly</i> familiar with all the tools, enough that you have your API calls completely committed to memory.<p>If you look at most programmers who have a reputation for being insanely productive, they all follow this pattern.  Fabrice Bellard works pretty much exclusively in C, mostly on signal-processing or low-level emulation.  Rob Pike works all in Go using the plan9 stack.  John Carmack is all games and 3D graphics, using OpenGL.  Jeff Dean has two major interests - distributed systems and large-scale machine learning - and works basically exclusively in C++.<p>I read an interview with Guido van Rossum, Jeff Dean, and Craig Silverstein within Google where they were asked basically the same question, and the answer all of them gave was "The ability to hold the entire program in your head."