I think hero-worship in any field is weird and unhealthy. That said, Bellard is astonishingly talented and prolific and it's hard to look at someone like that and say he's just a mortal who tries his best to write code, just like everyone else.
So what is it that causes this big gulf in productivity? I know that as a programmer I have all sorts of internal and external obstacles to just sitting down and churning out entire projects, let alone something useful with clever and high-quality code. Is a 10x rockstar just somebody who's been able to eliminate most of their obstacles, and has some amount of talent left over to solve problems with?
So what is it that causes this big gulf in productivity? I know that as a programmer I have all sorts of internal and external obstacles to just sitting down and churning out entire projects, let alone something useful with clever and high-quality code. Is a 10x rockstar just somebody who's been able to eliminate most of their obstacles, and has some amount of talent left over to solve problems with?