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Comment by paulitex | Hacker News Reader

He really did that all without a search engine or looking at any API docs?? Maybe it's just cause I'm not a games programmer, but that's insane. How does he know what he's programming to?

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Experience. Code with an API long enough and you're pretty aware of the tools at your disposal. At this point you're not learning new stuff. Finally, this likely pales in comparison to what he is typically used to doing.

Eclipse has autocomplete and documentation built in as well, right?

Autocomplete is there. Also you have the ability to create your own micros that you can use to build skeletons (like a function, or a loop). I'm not sure about itegrated docs. You'll probably get a brief pop-up (hit-or-miss), but nothing like XCode's inline docs.

FYI: Docs are fully integrated and appear for example together when moving through the list of autocomplete suggestions. Very similar to XCode's inline docs. Alternatively, you can press Ctrl and every function call, class definition and so on becomes a link to the source code defintion of that function or class, respectively. Such are manifold possibilies for tool support in statically typed languages.

As someone else pointed out, the programmer is Notch, the guy behind Minecraft, which is also written in Java, so I assume he has been neck-deep in the Java graphics APIs long enough to have enough of it memorized.

Was he even using any APIs other than audio and basic graphics and keyboard/mouse IO functions?

It's still pretty impressive if he implemented his own sprite class from scratch and built a game with it in 48 hours.

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