Cursed Computer Scientists of History

Following this tweet thread of history’s most goated/cracked computer scientists/coders/software engineers, I was thinking about how so many computer scientists led a truly insane life, you might even say they are cursed individuals.

Here’s a running list of the most cursed software engineers in history.

• Richard Stallman - creator of the GNU project, godfather of the free web, voluntarily outted himself as a child molester.
• John McCaffee - deep in the throes of a full-blown substance addiction, ex-Nasa programmer developed the world’s first and most commercially successful antivirus software while high on a cornucopia of mind altering drugs; proceeded to spend the next two decades in Central America fleeing the US government, had an untold number of prostitutes shit on his chest, killed his neighbor, and died in apparent suicide. Also ran for president twice (libertarian).
• why the lucky stiff - extremely influential early rubyist and open source developer who inspired the likes of DHH and others; shocked the entire open source world when the once-prolific _why disappeared under apparent duress, never to be seen again.
• Denis Pushkarev (aka @zloirock) - Russian creator of core-js, one of the most critical and ubiquitous libraries in the javascript ecosystem. Suddenly dropped off the map in 2020 when it turns out he went to jail for killing someone with a motorbike, said to be an accident. He lives in abject squalor, rotting away in a rural prison in Russia while his library gets 100s of millions of downloads per week and relied upon heavily by companies like Uber, Airbnb, Stripe, etc. with zero compensation for him.
• Terry Davis - experienced a manic episode in 2003, following which he devoted the rest of his life to creating TempleOS, the first operating system devoted to god. This included a programming language called HolyC which he implemented from scratch. Died when hit by a train in 2018.