Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

blog.tojicode.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 204 posts

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

#171

Post by lvturner »

Ygg2 wrote: post #107
KVFinn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

To paraphrase a saying - aim for Carmack, maybe then at least, you'll hit Notch.

A 'Notch' below Carmack?

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

#172

Post by kayoone »

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…

The perspective of this is so wrong. Minecraft was a Plaything for notch, he wrote the beginnings of it in his free time while working for a different company. He certainly never thought of or even optimized it for being a massive world wide hitgame that needs a consistent modding API. If he did that, i am sure that Minecraft would probably never have seen the light of day as he would have lost interest in it, because most of all it was a sideproject to creatively explore an idea.

Coming in years later when everything has grown tremendously and saying that many of the early design decision were wrong, is so ignorant it infuriates me.

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

#173

Post by copx »

missing_cipher wrote: post #23

Where would a noob to this kind of stuff start? I'd like to draw a rectangle to the screen. :)

Here:

  Rectangle(100, 100, 400, 400)
That or something very similar [1] draws a rectangle from pixel position (100,100) to (400,400) in many high level 2D graphics environments. Just posting this to point out that you do not have to make things more complicated than necessary.

OpenGL is a standard for hardware accelerated 3D graphics and it is inherently complex because of that. If you just want to do 2D do not bother with it.

[1] http://love2d.org/wiki/love.graphics.rectangle

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

#174

Post by kibibu »

thezoid wrote: post #166
justinhj wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give a couple of concrete examples of why he's so terrible? Or at least the areas in which he is not strong. Because it's clear to me that Minecraft was a fun and stable experience from the end users perspective, at least when I bought it (which was probably a good 18 months after the initial launch).

I'll put this out there that I'm more in the "I'm a maintainer" group, so my lens when looking at code is very much in the "how can I maintain this" sense. There were a few articles written up about a year ago [1] from interviews with Notch. He does stuff like direct variable access instead of using setters/getters because it "gets in the way" which when it comes to encapsulation and separation of concern, etc. it th…

> instead of using setters/getters because it "gets in the way"

In my opinion it genuinely does get in the way. I want to add a member variable to an object - in many languages (JS, C#, Python for example) you can just declare it and move along, knowing that you can switch it to a property later if you need special handling.

In Java, however, for future maintenance I have to write a `public int getPaula()`, `public void setPaula(int brillant)`. This not only violates YAGNI, it slows things down in the physical "I have to type more" sense.

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

#175

Post by [deleted] »

thezoid wrote: post #166
justinhj wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give a couple of concrete examples of why he's so terrible? Or at least the areas in which he is not strong. Because it's clear to me that Minecraft was a fun and stable experience from the end users perspective, at least when I bought it (which was probably a good 18 months after the initial launch).

I'll put this out there that I'm more in the "I'm a maintainer" group, so my lens when looking at code is very much in the "how can I maintain this" sense. There were a few articles written up about a year ago [1] from interviews with Notch. He does stuff like direct variable access instead of using setters/getters because it "gets in the way" which when it comes to encapsulation and separation of concern, etc. it th…

[deleted]

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

#176

Post by Fr0styMatt »

kibibu wrote: post #174
thezoid wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll put this out there that I'm more in the "I'm a maintainer" group, so my lens when looking at code is very much in the "how can I maintain this" sense. There were a few articles written up about a year ago [1] from interviews with Notch. He does stuff like direct variable access instead of using setters/getters because it "gets in the way" which when it comes to encapsulation and separation of concern, etc. it th…

> instead of using setters/getters because it "gets in the way" In my opinion it genuinely does get in the way. I want to add a member variable to an object - in many languages (JS, C#, Python for example) you can just declare it and move along, knowing that you can switch it to a property later if you need special handling. In Java, however, for future maintenance I have to write a `public int getPaula()`, `public v…

While it would seem that getters and setters vs public fields are very similar, there's a catch at least in the C# world - if you have a raw public field and later decide to change it to a property, that breaks your public interface and you have to rebuild stuff against your library.

Thankfully C# makes declaring getters and setters easy from the start, so it's not an issue to use them:

public int SomeField { get; private set; }

That gives you a public property called SomeField which can be retrieved, but which can only be set privately by the class. I'd hate having to write GetBlah and SetBlah; it's damn ugly.

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

#177

Post by Kiro »

_2dsr wrote: post #124
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…

Notch tweeted this in, I'm assuming, response to this thread: > "Just saw a nerd flamewar debating if I'm a bad programmer. I'm self-taught, prefer working along, and program for fun. Don't learn from me." Take it for what you will. https://twitter.com/notch/statuses/408011329237049344

Does he mean "alone"?

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

#178

Post by Kiro »

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…

I don't know what standards you are used to but I would really like to know who you consider to be a good programmer. Are you a good programmer? If Notch is a "terrible, terrible coder" then what are the people (ie: normal programmers) who can barely build a standard web CRUD app?

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

#179

Post by willvarfar »

thezoid wrote: post #166
justinhj wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give a couple of concrete examples of why he's so terrible? Or at least the areas in which he is not strong. Because it's clear to me that Minecraft was a fun and stable experience from the end users perspective, at least when I bought it (which was probably a good 18 months after the initial launch).

I'll put this out there that I'm more in the "I'm a maintainer" group, so my lens when looking at code is very much in the "how can I maintain this" sense. There were a few articles written up about a year ago [1] from interviews with Notch. He does stuff like direct variable access instead of using setters/getters because it "gets in the way" which when it comes to encapsulation and separation of concern, etc. it th…

get/set went the way of the dodo when eclipse got refactoring.

Its a single-app code-base. Its not an API anyone consumes. Using get/set boilerplate really is just getting in the way.

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

#180

Post by r41nbowcrash »

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…

I remember liking the AI - all these different objects, complex, emergent behaviours, expressed usually in less than 40 lines of code. Clean, effective, with great bang to buck ratio.

If modding was high on their list of priorities, I'm pretty sure they would get it right.

Post reply on HN