Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by melling » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 8:45 PM UTC

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…

What kind of a person even idolizes someone for writing great code? Steve Jobs couldn't code at all. Facebook was written in PHP. GroupOn started on WordPress. According to this Slashdot article, Sergey and Larry aren't great programmers.

http://tech-beta.slashdot.org/story/13/11/01/1324209/larry-p...

The Instagram founders didn't have a programming background:

http://thenextweb.com/2012/04/10/instagrams-ceo-had-no-forma...

My take away is that beyond getting the job done, joining the priesthood of programmers is pretty low on what's important.

If you want to be successful, focus on the other things then hire a bunch of programmers to continue your dream once you hit it big. By the way, make sure the interviews are insanely difficult and keep your geeks out of the weeds (e.g. HN). Geeks love to play in the weeds!

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

#62

Post by michaelfdeberry » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 8:51 PM UTC

skizm wrote: post #44

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

#63

Post by nhoj » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 8:51 PM UTC

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…

A terrible terrible coder? That's a really insulting negative tone. Maybe he is not the best but he is clearly not terrible. Out of all the programmers in the world my guess would be that he is easily in the top 1-5% even if he leaves messy code behind.

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

#64

Post by jiggy2011 » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 8:52 PM UTC

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #53

exit wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mes…

Was minecraft supposed to be modable from day 1? I know from my own experience that if you design a large monolithic application and then decide afterwards that you want a pluggable system, it's never easy if you don't have time to refactor the whole thing.

Also network programming and game/graphics programming are different disciplines with their own challenges. Big studios might assign different people to these tasks, so I wouldn't expect somebody to be amazing at both.

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

#65

Post by coldtea » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 8:54 PM UTC

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. He makes very basic mistakes very frequently and his core designs are flawed.

So, he's a pragmatic programmer that gets shit done -- to the point of being able to design his own toy CPU architecture (which already puts him above 90% of the programmers out there, including people that HAD hardware architecture classes at university).

Sorry if he doesn't live up to your standards...

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

#66

Post by Sir_Cmpwn » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 8:55 PM UTC

nhoj wrote: post #63

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…

A terrible terrible coder? That's a really insulting negative tone. Maybe he is not the best but he is clearly not terrible. Out of all the programmers in the world my guess would be that he is easily in the top 1-5% even if he leaves messy code behind.

No, he really is terrible. I'm dead serious. I am responsible for working with his crap all the time, and I probably know more about the technical workings of Minecraft than even he does.

Notch writes terrible code.

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

#67

Post by coldtea » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 8:55 PM UTC

KVFinn wrote: post #54

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. 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 w…

>(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.)

Fuck, most of those I know couldn't get a basic CRUD app up and running in a week...

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

#68

Post by coldtea » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 8:56 PM UTC

nhoj wrote: post #63

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…

A terrible terrible coder? That's a really insulting negative tone. Maybe he is not the best but he is clearly not terrible. Out of all the programmers in the world my guess would be that he is easily in the top 1-5% even if he leaves messy code behind.

>No, he really is terrible. I'm dead serious.

Yes, but then you are also dead wrong.

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

#69

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 8:58 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by chrismonsanto » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 8:59 PM UTC

melling wrote: post #61

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…

What kind of a person even idolizes someone for writing great code? Steve Jobs couldn't code at all. Facebook was written in PHP. GroupOn started on WordPress. According to this Slashdot article, Sergey and Larry aren't great programmers. http://tech-beta.slashdot.org/story/13/11/01/1324209/larry-p... The Instagram founders didn't have a programming background: http://thenextweb.com/2012/04/10/instagrams-ceo-had-no-f…

> What kind of a person even idolizes someone for writing great code?

Are we on the same site? I've been reading HN since it was called Startup News, and I have never felt such a disconnect before.

> The Instagram founders didn't have a programming background

Instagram could be worth a trillion dollars and I wouldn't give a shit about it. Show me the code. Satisfy me intellectually. Not everything is about money, and that is part of the reason I call myself a hacker--coding for the sake of coding and what not.