Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohwp | Hacker News Reader

Some days ago there were comments about Notch being a bad programmer. And when I see posts like this I think that's unfair.

2500 lines of C doesn't mean a thing. I could do it in 1 line when I removed all line breaks.

Did the programmer created the concept, interaction design, graphic design? No, Notch did.

So maybe Notch does write bad code but I think being a programmer is more than just writing code. In the end Notch got the job done and people are enjoying the result.

But yeah! great to see another Minecraft clone. It's always nice when people share there knowledge!

View on HN

That's not the point. Thing like this can inspires wannabe game developers.

Reading through large source code can be very discouraging for someone that want to start programming. Things like this show that with a little bit of Math and few libraries you can bootstrap a little universe.

> So maybe Notch does write bad code but I think being a programmer is more than just writing code. In the end Notch got the job done and people are enjoying the result.

But by that logic Farmville is a great game, too, and it also makes the script authors of some TV series objectively great authors.

Is success noble per definition, and sanctifies the means, or does the nobility of means sanctify the success they achieve? For me it's the latter, never the former.

Mind you, I said nothing about Notch being a great or bad programmer/designer, I simply disagree with the logic.

>2500 lines of C doesn't mean a thing. I could do it in 1 line when I removed all line breaks.

Actually it means a lot -- since it has proper line breaks.

Agree. Notch turned his code into hundreds of millions of dollars, so not much attention should be paid to people calling him a bad programmer.

He didn't created the concept but took the ideas from Dwarf Fortress and he says it :) http://notch.tumblr.com/post/227922045/the-origins-of-minecr...

But still minecraft makes a 2012 macbookpro overheat like no other game, I get 80°C while Minecraft alternative clients/servers barely make it to 70°

If you had bothered to actually read the linked article, he claims to have been..."inspired" by infiniminer more than any other game.

" But then I found Infiniminer. My god, I realized that that was the game I wanted to do"

I personally found this clone to be compelling for a few reasons:

1) FOSS means I can play with the code, which I can't with Minecraft 2) I'm trying to re-learn C, and having some relatively well done modern examples that are of reasonable scope that I can understand is really useful 3) It runs really fast on my laptop

Its not going to replace Minecraft at all, but I don't personally feel that's the point.

I saw this livestream and I bet everyone though he was a great programmer. Even though he was writing code similar to what he was already writing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM0MYoEU2-k

Really, who are we comparing him against?

I don't think I can get a good idea as to the quality of his code from this video.

Hmm, but if you found out later that Quake's codebase was ugly, would you think less of John Carmack? I love beautiful code, but its an ideal to be achieved... It can't be as important as the product itself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com