6 ms·

A terrible terrible coder? That's a really insulting negative tone. Maybe he is not the best but he is clearly not terrible. Out of all the programmers in the w

• Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
  No, he really is terrible. I'm dead serious. I am responsible for working with his crap all the time, and I probably know more about the technical workings of Minecraft than even he does. Notch writes terrible code.
  • keypusher 13y ago
    Sorry to break it to you, but this is the reaction of most people working on others code. It all looks like a bunch of crap held together with duct tape and string when you are the one trying to maintain it or make it do something that wasn't thought about when it was designed.
    • pkolaczk 13y ago
      You're right that reading code is harder than writing, but I think your statement is too extreme - it implies crap code does not really exist or everything is crap. However, we all know that only 90% of everything is crap. Personally I maintained various codebases (not written by me) and some of them were really terrible, utter mess, while some others were pretty nice to work with, even if I had to refactor sometimes. If programmers thought about code design at least for a while before writing it, and then the code is well-organized (= good separation of concerns, no global state, no copy-paste, complex parts isolated from the simple parts) - it doesn't matter that much that they didn't think of a new feature you're now adding to it.
  • justinhj 13y ago
    Can you give a couple of concrete examples of why he's so terrible? Or at least the areas in which he is not strong. Because it's clear to me that Minecraft was a fun and stable experience from the end users perspective, at least when I bought it (which was probably a good 18 months after the initial launch).
    • Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
      I mentioned some in a response to a similar comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6842944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6842944
      • chipsy 13y ago
        There's a pattern to your complaints, which is that they are most impacting to long-term external contribution. That's the area where architecture is driven by philosophy. It's whether or not you _choose_ to study the problem, search for best practices, and work out contingencies during the design phase, or go forward with a simplistic, unknown solution and study it by driving trucks over it[0]. With most exploratory programming - of which games are a prime example - you want to drive trucks because your design is likely to be reworked many times regardless. As well, independent creation not driven by clients and markets has to be done entirely selfishly. When taking this to heart, one naturally moves towards an exploratory style, because selfish, truck-driving code will satisfy your urges more quickly. [0] http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/11/26 http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/11/26
    • thezoid 13y ago
      I'll put this out there that I'm more in the "I'm a maintainer" group, so my lens when looking at code is very much in the "how can I maintain this" sense. There were a few articles written up about a year ago [1] from interviews with Notch. He does stuff like direct variable access instead of using setters/getters because it "gets in the way" which when it comes to encapsulation and separation of concern, etc. it throws off some red flags. I've looked at some of his (at least I believe they were his) projects when attempting to learn a game library (libGDX) and was kinda grossed out by the code. You can say that it's because it was from a Ludum Dare perhaps, but you have to think that he kinda does this all the time. So what would be different from his production stuff. Pretty much don't look at him as a programming idol, he's simply too cowboy for that. That's fine, cowboys have built tons of stuff, but if you are trying to learn something you may want to avoid their stuff cause it's probably running against the grain in a bad way. [1] The Article -- http://notch.tumblr.com/post/15782716917/coding-skill-and-the-decline-of-stagnation http://notch.tumblr.com/post/15782716917/coding-skill-and-th...
  • peterashford 13y ago
    That's just plain rude.
  • randomdata 13y ago
    Not being familiar with his programming abilities or style at all, if we took all of the code ever written, is Notch's code at the very bottom of the pile? That is what I take terrible to mean. According to some links posted elsewhere in this discussion, Notch admits himself that he is not the world's best programmer, but can we honestly say his code is bad enough that we can consider him one of the world's worst programmers? Or are you really trying to say his code is average to good, with some mistakes made along the way?
• coldtea 13y ago
  >No, he really is terrible. I'm dead serious. Yes, but then you are also dead wrong.