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

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

#101

Post by willismichael » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 10:13 PM UTC

romaniv wrote: post #98

willismichael wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed - nobody is arguing that throwing together sloppy code is always a good thing. Mostly I'm just saying that some amount of sloppy code isn't necessary a bad thing. Like you say, the amount of sloppy code that you can get away with depends on what you are doing. There are vast discussions about this both online and in books, referring to "sloppy code" as "technical debt". Just like monetary debt, sometimes it is…

Software engineers have an unfortunate tendency to accumulate technical debt and then run away from paying it. I've seen this way, way more often and with far worse overall cost than any kind of perfectionism. The dichotomy between quality and speed of development is often an illusion anyway.

I find it fascinating that elsewhere on this thread somebody expressed the opinion that "overengineering ... kills more projects than anything else" and here you express the opinion that a much worse problem is engineers bailing out after running up technical debt. To be honest, I really can't say which is worse, I've had to cope with both of them from other people. All I can say is that my tendency is to overengineer.

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

#102

Post by vectorpush » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 10:14 PM UTC

corresation wrote: post #83

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 is a very bad programmer I despise this sort of single-dimension haughty evaluation of programming "goodness": It is garbage, and is the dismissive grenades that a particular type of maintenance programmer tosses to feel better about themselves as they try to feed the family with sloppy seconds. I single out maintenance programmers because there is a stark difference between creating something out of nothing, a…

Agreed. A programmer maintaining a new project is going to feel frustrated when the application cannot be easily extended in a way that they expect, but the original author should be forgiven for not predicting every possible future permutation of their existing code base. The best design decision might seem obvious from the maintainer's perspective, but given 100 different maintainers, you'll end up with 200 different solutions, half of which will make the original application seem ridiculous when framed in the context of a massive rewrite that takes into account every business decision that time and experience has yielded since the start of the project.

Further, there are times when a good programmer must deliberately exclude forward thinking solutions because a non-functioning product precludes a successful business. Yes, it should still be a secure solution. Yes, a TODO label may be warranted, but a surefire way to get yourself labeled as a bad programmer is to spend weeks working out "future proof" solutions while the competition is shipping an application that can be successfully executed.

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

#103

Post by melling » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 10:14 PM UTC

georgemcbay wrote: post #95

melling wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beats me. I guess someday when you're an old man, right before you close your eyes for the last time, you can imagine all that cool code that you wrote, and say what a great life you had. You were a hacker. Steve, Larry, Notch, and the Instagram guys can know what they did made a difference. The world is a different place because they lived. They connected the important dots and hacked life...

There are lots of ways to live a great life and relatively few of them involve fame and fortune. Also there are many people who make a big difference without achieving fame and fortune. Even within the tech industry I would argue that, for example, Dennis Ritchie's contributions were far more fundamentally important than any of the people you listed, yet he never achieved the massive wealth or mainstream fame of thos…

I didn't say that you had to achieve massive wealth or fame. I said being that "idolizing someone for writing great code" isn't a worthwhile goal. Dennis Ritchie created two important products that are still used today: C and Unix. I think you'd find plenty of people would have a lot of bad things to say about C, for example, but it did solve a problem and help move the world forward.

By the way, why wouldn't you mention Bertrand Meyer or Niklaus Wirth?

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

#104

Post by melling » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 10:15 PM UTC

voltagex_ wrote: post #88

melling wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beats me. I guess someday when you're an old man, right before you close your eyes for the last time, you can imagine all that cool code that you wrote, and say what a great life you had. You were a hacker. Steve, Larry, Notch, and the Instagram guys can know what they did made a difference. The world is a different place because they lived. They connected the important dots and hacked life...

Have you read Stephen Levy's Hackers ? I'm not sure Instagram would even exist without the pioneering programmers who started out on model trains...

Yes, we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. Can we be done now? This really is a waste of time.

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

#105

Post by BHSPitMonkey » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 10:22 PM UTC

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. :)

If you're not feeling ready for 3D graphics, Khan Academy has a neat set of interactive lessons where you learn to draw and animate basic shapes using the HTML5 Canvas API (Javascript):

https://www.khanacademy.org/cs/programming

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

#106

Post by jebblue » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 10:23 PM UTC

corresation wrote: post #83

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 is a very bad programmer I despise this sort of single-dimension haughty evaluation of programming "goodness": It is garbage, and is the dismissive grenades that a particular type of maintenance programmer tosses to feel better about themselves as they try to feed the family with sloppy seconds. I single out maintenance programmers because there is a stark difference between creating something out of nothing, a…

Agreed, I don't have much to add, I've been on both sides of the fence. Your comments hit it exactly, conjuring something from nothing takes amazing talent. Taking that and making it better is arduous but there is a path there, it's not easy I know, but the path is there.

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

#107

Post by Ygg2 » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 10:23 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…

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

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

#108

Post by jebblue » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 10:29 PM UTC

voltagex_ wrote: post #89

MrZongle2 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sir_Cmpwn's assessment of Notch was harsh, but not wrong . Notch isn't in the same league as a John Carmack, for example. The most recent release of Minecraft saw massive changes to the underbelly of the game, all of which is being done by Mojang staff other than Notch. The game does have a ton of warts, especially where modding is involved, which can be traced to some of Notch's technical decisions. Does that mean t…

>especially where modding is involved The modding API consists of decompiling the entire thing and monkey-patching it. Does anyone else see a problem with that? It's such a fantastic game but it's really unfortunate.

And there are plugin developers making good money, server operators doing nothing but running Minecraft servers and living on donations and other monetization schemes. Was he supposed to make the best selling indie game in history and make it easy as pie for the modders to make a living too? He was one guy.

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

#109

Post by Mithaldu » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 10:30 PM UTC

DigitalJack wrote: post #85

tehwebguy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

#110

Post by arrrg » Tue, Dec 03, 2013, 10:36 PM UTC

jiggy2011 wrote: post #64

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tas…

No, it wasn’t written that way at all. Notch never intended it to be moddable and he had no idea at all that modding would be such a big deal for Minecraft. In the very beginning Notch was even (slightly) opposed to modding. I think it was more like a gut reaction: People are doing things with my stuff I didn’t expect and I don’t like it. (Not that he ever even began to consider taking legal steps against it or something awful like that.)

He came around to it, though. By the time he handed Minecraft off he was fully in the “modding is great for Minecraft” camp. But the game was never developed for that. A real modding API has been in the works for quite some time now, but it seems to be quite hard to pull that off.