He looks slow and prone to repetitive patterns. Overall, I wouldn't hire.
tl;dr: He's not using Emacs
tl;dr: He's not using Emacs
However, it's worth noting that if you'd have a job that Notch is willing to take and you are not hiring him into that role then it's practically a factual statement that your hiring process is broken. Admittedly that's a contrived scenario as he made tens of millions from Minecraft and founded a gaming company who's chief reason to exist is to finish the games that Notch starts.
Why do you say that? Do you think Notch's success is a result of him being an exceptionally competent programmer?
Notch has proven he's able to program fun games, and his programming styles is pretty well tailored to that
Who's to say if the goal changed he wouldn't change his style too
He belongs right where he is, as an indie game developer - kickstarting a fun game, alone, from scratch, proving that it is popular and that people love it, and then letting more skillful programmers take over developing it and fixing all the bugs that he created.
I'd have to guess that he is in fact a very skilled software developer. Minecraft is a fairly complex project, as is emulating a 16-bit CPU within the constraints of a game environment.
And I'm curious, what wouldn't you hire him for?
I've seen his posts about how git is too hard to learn[1] so he's going to stick with svn. I've seen him post that "we've started to bring in bug fixing into the development method"[2], and then the very next release is a "bug fix" release which causes more new bugs than it solves.[3]
I wouldn't hire him for a software development job that required any level of maintenance. He's good at creating original fun concepts but not at making it nice for people to read, modify, or maintain his code.
Also, I would argue that emulating a 16-bit CPU within the constraints of a game environment is easy and straightforward. For one, it's ridiculously simple to do test driven development without any overhead. And second, have you seen all the emulators that have cropped up after the specs were posted? There is already an emulator for almost every popular programming language.
[0]: https://github.com/superjoe30/mineflayer [1]: http://notch.tumblr.com/post/2623477410/strategy-meeting-day... [2]: http://notch.tumblr.com/post/4423138657/11-11-11 [3]: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Version_history (might have to view history)
I agree that git is hard to learn and also that emulating a 16-bit CPU is straightforward.
"Oh, and I’ve finally committed the Music Blocks to the repository.
(Oh, wait, no, I didn’t.. Doing so broke git, so we’re changing to svn because git is horrible and evil)"
Everybody's entitled to have one. Did I try to suppress him expressing his opinion? No, I just piled mine on top.
> It doesn't take a chicken to judge an egg.
"Goes to credibility, your honor", as they say in legal tv series.
I don't know about chickens and eggs, but I believe that it sure takes a good programmer to be able to judge another. It's a technical field, it's not something really subjective. So you have to know your stuff in order to judge what someone else does --if anything, we have too many misinformed opinions.
I have never thought of minecraft as an especially buggy game after the 1.0 release.