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Comment by TheZenPsycho | Hacker News Reader

So, uhm... how many blockbuster games have you shipped, just out of curiosity? Not an ad hominem attack. Just, curious, because someone with such confident opinions as yours about notch's abilities must surely have shipped a few.

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> Not an ad hominem attack

I don't think just saying that makes it true

It's not attacking a person to ask them to back up their qualifications to judge.

How many movies or tv shows have you made? Have you ever told someone that a tv show was bad? I bet the answers are zero and plenty, respectively.

The kind of argument you're making is a very big fallacy.

That's not really a rational analogy. That would be analogous if we were discussing someone consuming minecraft (i.e. playing it), not someone working on it.

Asking for qualifications isn't the same as asking for evidence

The discussion is highly subjective. Qualifications are the only kind of evidence there is.

I think he may have a point: Notch doesn't need to be an amazing developer but an effective one that delivers.

I don't know Notch's abilities, but from one of his LD videos I can tell he's very focused and knows his craft.

I wouldn't call Britney Spears the pinnacle of contemporary arts. But she certainly shipped.

Not the same at all! We're talking about Notch's process. I don't think there's any disagreement about his product being top notch (sorry). The product of BS is well, BS, and her process be damned.

None. I didn't say Notch can't ship a blockbuster game (and he can ship exactly one). I said he can't code worth a damn, and should not be idolized for his prowess.

Notch's code is worth $150 million dollars. What's the going rate for "a damn" these days?

As amusing as your wordplay might be, the point being made is that Notch's coding skill should not be idolized or used as a reference for writing good code. A tangible consequence of his inability is that Minecraft takes up far more resources than it reasonably should and is very difficult to maintain, which has been echoed by several Mojang devs who have since picked it up.

Do you think they'll ever move away from Java?

Do you think Minecraft requires a complete rewrite to be maintainable?

I don't think they'll ever move away from Java. I don't think Minecraft requires something quite on the scale of a complete rewrite, but perhaps starting from scratch and pasting in bits and pieces of the original to save time would help things.

They are working on rewriting substantial portions of the codebase, but unfortunatley Notch didn't hand it off to the most skilled maintainers and they aren't making things much better.

they have already moved away from Java via JNI for some aspects of the game, like openGL 2.0 support.

I think this line of thought is a big problem in the development community.

There is a clear separation between code quality and shipping a successful products. Ideally you would want both if possible, but a product is not just code.

Ideally both, but if I had to sacrifice code quality for a successful product I would sort in exponential time if it meant getting a working product out the door faster. It doesn't need to be good, just good enough. (IMO obviously)

Very few folks are idolizing him for his code correctness, but for his ability to prototype and ship.

I've worked with developers like Notch. I like them because they can create rapidly iterate apps/sites/ideas that normal people/users understand and critique. Then developers like me come in and polish the turds under the covers so we can ship and maintain.

He's not writing SQLite or Space Shuttle code, it's a amusement.

"I said he can't code worth a damn"

Go and get developers at various companies. Not necessarily game companies, get someone that is payed a salary for "coding".

Give them some rough specifications (for example, a simple maze, simple lighting) and ask for Dart/WebGL to be used, and a timeframe of one month.

See what happens.

Based on my experience, 5% of developers may present something like it.

So, ok, Notch may produce spaguetti code, bugs, etc, but he's probably in that top 5% of developers. (Which is also debatable because someone may be good at, let's say, web development but couldn't code a game to save their lives)

99% of game and webdevs are like this.

He's your tech co founder when you want to flip fast. Not your first engineer hire.

everyone wants another Carmack, but while productive, he is not (yet?)

anyway, i haven't shipped any blockbuster game (it is not even my job to do so) so i will see myself out now.

I started this way. I could iterate on new game prototypes quickly because I made many games then threw them away.

Might be worth noting his game plays and looks like minecraft.

After getting burned by my own design decisions, which each game I made I produced stronger abstractions and decoupled code. Aka learning from mistakes.

Devs who only write protoslop or devs who only maintain and clean code up are rarely effective on their own.

No, it's close to an appeal to authority fallacy. The person you've replied to has reimplemented the Minecraft server along with a few other frameworks.

It would be a fallacy if I had a point, and an argument to make. I have neither. Only a question, with the purposes of placing the comments in some kind of context.

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