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Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

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Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#51

Post by xradionut »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #38
TheZenPsycho wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#52

Post by raverbashing »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #38
TheZenPsycho wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

"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)

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#53

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

exit wrote: post #46
ddevault wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also spent time examining Notch's coding habits. He is a terrible, terrible coder. Minecraft was (and still is) an unoptimized, poorly designed piece of crap when he handed it off to the rest of Mojang. The DCPU-16 he designed had many flaws and his assembler for it threw out assembly convention. He makes very basic mistakes very frequently and his core designs are flawed. I say this as someone who has spent a c…

can you elaborate on what's so terrible about his coding style?

There are lots of problems with it. Here are a couple:

He uses poor OpenGL practices, and sees poor performance as a result. He also designed the entire product in a way that makes it cumbersome to mod, without a consistent interface or a logical way for mods to work together. Modding Minecraft as a whole is one big hack.

I'm more familiar with the networking side of things. The Minecraft networking protocol is a mess. There are 9 or 10 different ways to encode a vector in the protocol. He made up "Named Binary Tags", a dictionary serialization format, which could have better been served with existing tech. He frequently misuses signedness in the protocol. He made up another obtuse dictionary format for describing entity metadata. He screwed up backwards compatibility for the only thing that needed to be backwards compatible - three times. His colleagues later screwed things up even more.

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#54

Post by KVFinn »

ddevault wrote: post #29
kleiba wrote: post #19

Now, I haven't seen one line of Notch's code. I have no idea if it's well structured or spaghetti. I would make an educated guess and say that there's a lot of the basics in this project that have been ported over from the Minecraft or 0x10c code. This last point is rather unlikely I think. I spent more than one or two weeks worth of time watching the various screencasts you can find on twitch.tv of Notch coding (I f…

I've also spent time examining Notch's coding habits. He is a terrible, terrible coder. Minecraft was (and still is) an unoptimized, poorly designed piece of crap when he handed it off to the rest of Mojang. The DCPU-16 he designed had many flaws and his assembler for it threw out assembly convention. He makes very basic mistakes very frequently and his core designs are flawed. I say this as someone who has spent a c…

>He is a terrible, terrible coder. Minecraft was (and still is) an unoptimized, poorly designed piece of crap when he handed it off to the rest of Mojang. The DCPU-16 he designed had many flaws and his assembler for it threw out assembly convention.

Notch is inspiring to me the way people like Carmack are not, because I know I'll never be a Carmack -- he's operating on an entirely different level than me. But Notch was able to change the world as a regular programmer plugging away. What he does not seem hopelessly out of reach of my capabilities. You can have a huge impact just being 'good enough'!

(and 'terrible' is hyperbole -- certainly most of the programmers around me at work could not get a 3D engine with Dart up and running in a week, or design a cpu and assembler -- even bad ones.)

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#55

Post by aidenn0 »

krapp wrote: post #24

>Don't build an engine that you will someday build a game on top of, because you will never get past step one. I have several still-unfinished Game Maker apps which more or less died because I got so bogged down on the "engine". So yeah.

In this case, I see an analogy with the whole "Do it manually with a few customers" advice for startups that pops up from time-to-time. You write the damn code from scratch and see what gameplay is interesting, then you can write tools within that domain.

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#56

Post by raverbashing »

discreteevent wrote: post #7

I don't want to criticise the blub essay too much because there were some valid points in there. But in fairness as soon as I read it I thought of John Carmack. He uses C++. Given that the perspective of the essay is Lisp then if C++ isn't a blub I don't know what is. But John Carmack is really productive. Also he doesn't use vi or emacs. He uses an IDE! He used it even before it had any bells or whistles at all. (He…

Well, yes, I used an IDE in the Turbo Pascal/Turbo C++ era from which John Carmack comes

DJGPP and RHIDE as well.

It was not common to use a separate editor apart from the "programming environment"

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#57

Post by marknutter »

ddevault wrote: post #29
kleiba wrote: post #19

Now, I haven't seen one line of Notch's code. I have no idea if it's well structured or spaghetti. I would make an educated guess and say that there's a lot of the basics in this project that have been ported over from the Minecraft or 0x10c code. This last point is rather unlikely I think. I spent more than one or two weeks worth of time watching the various screencasts you can find on twitch.tv of Notch coding (I f…

I've also spent time examining Notch's coding habits. He is a terrible, terrible coder. Minecraft was (and still is) an unoptimized, poorly designed piece of crap when he handed it off to the rest of Mojang. The DCPU-16 he designed had many flaws and his assembler for it threw out assembly convention. He makes very basic mistakes very frequently and his core designs are flawed. I say this as someone who has spent a c…

And if he had spent his time first becoming the perfect programmer (according to your standards) he probably wouldn't have bothered writing Minecraft in the first place. This type of attitude, and the lack of tact it's usually accompanied by, is by far the biggest issue with the programming community at large. I say this as a "terrible, terrible coder" who entered the field despite the fear of being labeled one.

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#58

Post by georgemcbay »

derefr wrote: post #42
ddevault wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also spent time examining Notch's coding habits. He is a terrible, terrible coder. Minecraft was (and still is) an unoptimized, poorly designed piece of crap when he handed it off to the rest of Mojang. The DCPU-16 he designed had many flaws and his assembler for it threw out assembly convention. He makes very basic mistakes very frequently and his core designs are flawed. I say this as someone who has spent a c…

I might say that Notch is the best kind of coder, for what his goals are. Notch is, really, a game designer. The goal of a game designer is to iterate a set of rules and mechanics until something fun is tracked down ("fun" is sort of the "product-market fit" of game development.) in the process, they may create prototypes that allow them, or others, to play-test the rules/mechanics, but that prototype is not the outp…

"Will Wright doesn't code"

Probably not much now, but Will Wright did code his early games (eg. Raid on Bungeling Bay , SimCity, etc).

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#59

Post by colechristensen »

willismichael wrote: post #43
ddevault wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also spent time examining Notch's coding habits. He is a terrible, terrible coder. Minecraft was (and still is) an unoptimized, poorly designed piece of crap when he handed it off to the rest of Mojang. The DCPU-16 he designed had many flaws and his assembler for it threw out assembly convention. He makes very basic mistakes very frequently and his core designs are flawed. I say this as someone who has spent a c…

> He is a terrible, terrible coder. I've had an idea brewing in my head for quite some time, and while I still don't quite have the words to express it completely, it more or less boils down to this: There isn't necessarily a correlation between being a good programmer and shipping a successful product. Now of course we can argue over the definition of "good programmer" and "successful product". I started as a hobby…

The great is the enemy of the good.

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#60

Post by jiggy2011 »

kleiba wrote: post #19

Now, I haven't seen one line of Notch's code. I have no idea if it's well structured or spaghetti. I would make an educated guess and say that there's a lot of the basics in this project that have been ported over from the Minecraft or 0x10c code. This last point is rather unlikely I think. I spent more than one or two weeks worth of time watching the various screencasts you can find on twitch.tv of Notch coding (I f…

He probably uses multiple monitors and only streams one (at least he did when I watched). So he might be looking up documentation on another screen.
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